Movement Strategy Forum

Move over Wikipediocracy, Sucks, and yes, even Genderdesk aficionados.  There is a new forum in town.  The WMF invites participation in the prototype.

From the mailing list.  https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/H5V56Z2TIYEO5TX6UAJHQJDXPUK4CCYS/

(I have fixed the links, since links on the mailing list never work.)

Quim Gil

31 May 2022 

9:38 p.m.

Hello everyone, This is an invitation to all Movement Strategy participants and Wikimedians in general to try out a new platform for truly multilingual collaboration: Movement Strategy Forum – https://forum.movement-strategy.org/ We have started a community review <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/movement-strategy-forum-community-review/46> period of two months. If the community feedback is positive, the Forum will launch in August 2022 before Wikimania. If not, we will follow the feedback received, changing the proposal or closing it. We opened the Forum on May 24 with targeted outreach, hoping that the new site features would work. 😅 A week later, the Wikimedia login has been used by +200 users, the automatic translation is allowing speakers of different languages to discuss together, and we are ready to welcome more reviewers, testers, and other curious minds. We have just released the first weekly report <https://forum.movement-strategy.org/t/forum-weekly-report/387>. Looking forward to reading your first impressions in the next one! — Quim Gil (he/him) Director of Movement Strategy & Governance @ Wikimedia Foundation https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Qgil-WMF

 

Is this just the new “Wikimedia Space”?  (https://genderdesk.wordpress.com/category/wikimedia-space/ )

Why was that one taken down, by the way.

No idea why it is called “Movement Strategy Forum”.

The reasons presented for creating the thing are language support, representation for people who feel intimidated by on-wiki discussion, and the increasing tendency for Wikipedia-related discussions to take place on social media.  Also, people don’t trust the Foundation, but you wouldn’t expect them to come right out and say it.

There seems to be a huge opposition to the thing coming from two white dudes with beards. Their position seems to be that all discussion should take place on meta, “because I say so”.

~~~~

So what do I think? Because if you have read this far, that is what you really want to know, amirite?

Okay, so I spent 5 minutes looking at the new forum and the related documentation and this is what I think.

1. Sausagefest.
2. Okay there are a few female faces in some of the earlier threads, but they seems to all be WMF staffers, so they are probably either required to be there or are using the platform to advance the branding of their respective internal projects and/or departments; i.e. they are getting paid to post there.  The reason we know this is they are using their official WMF accounts.
3. The way to participate in the forum is that you are automatically logged in under your Wikipedia account.  Obviously this means I will not be participating. Will the WMF cry when they find out?  Will they even notice?
4. Since this is being run by the Foundation, the people who are on social media because they don’t trust the Foundation will probably not be participating.
5. What about dox? Can you get stuff deleted? There are people who will not participate in the mailing lists because there is no way to oversight the material. Once you type something, it is there forever.
6. The big selling point for this seems to be translation, but since I can’t participate, there doesn’t seem to be any way I can check out the language support. You can’t just read something in another language, you have to sign up. (Did I mention that they are thinking about doing away with the language support in the side bar for the various language Wikipedias? Yes, they are already testing it on French Wikipedia. It is just a matter of time, even though my spies tell me they have already gotten a bit of negative feedback.)
   
   In theory this might be good, though, since I do know some people who have stopped reading the mailing lists of various project groups, because trying to understand the non-native speakers is just too tiring. This is doubly true when there is audio without subtitles, like with podcasts or zoom. Maybe it would be easier to communicate through a translation program.
7. What is the thing for?  Probably the same as the old “Wikimedia Space”, promotion of individual projects, with the WMF as the intended target audience. Maybe it is meant as a showcase for people who are looking for grants?  Unless they can come up with a better reason for the thing, what will happen to it is probably the same thing that happened to the old one.
8. Will I read it? No.