Deutsche Version
中文版
Since about two years I am talking about the Five Pillars, it's a little like "back to the roots".
I wanted to write down my thoughts about the Five Pillars for quite some time, but never felt to be calm enough to do so. The reason for this is mainly outside of Wikimedia, mostly because of very intensive work days and the wish to spend more time with my man at the weekends.
Now I simply decided that this is an important issue and I will simply have time for these essays.
In this first post I would like to sketch the overall relations between the Five Pillars before I break down into every of the Five.
When Wikipedia was started there were no rules, no processes. There were only the Five Pillars. These are the principles upon which Wikipedia was based. But I think with some adoptation they are also principles for all Wikimedia Projects. So I will handle the Five Pillars as if they are not only the Five Pillars of Wikipedia, but the Five Pillars of all Wikimedia projects.
From a general view, every of these Five Pillars are equally important. There is not one which is most important, without any one of them our project would get a totally different character. All these Pillars are also not independant. They are tightly interrelated. If we change one, we will change them all, because we will change their internal relations, and we will change our projects as a whole, in a fundamental way.
The first Pillar frames the scope, purpose and content of every of our projects. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Wikimedia Commons is a repository of free media content, Wikibooks is a collection for text books, and so on and so on. Every project have such a scope statement or should have one. It gives every project its identity, its meaning of existence.
The second Pillar defines our position in the world. The humanity is a trimendous diverse and complicated entity. It is full of friendship but also full of conflicts. It is full of similarities and full of differences. The statement of neutrality, or in the case of Wikiversity, the disclosure of the point of view, put our projects outside of every of the conflicting parties and ideologies, but it is also a statement of openness. It states that everyone, every party, every ideology, has its place inside of our projects, every of them can be presented inside of our projects.
The third Pillar declares the purpose of our projects. Why are we doing all these works what we are doing. Although there were, are and would perhaps always be conspiration theories about sell out of Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects, this will never happen, because it is in one of the fundamentals of our projects, exactly in this pillar: We do all this for free, and it should remain free.
The fourth Pillar is about our internal organization. A wiki is an interactive tool. By interactive it does not mean interactive between the server (machine) and human, but interactivity between human beings. This pillar tells us how we should interact within our projects. It emphasizes the collaborative nature of our projects. This collaborative nature is at the end what made our projects great, not the combative behavior that sometimes we see, sorrowfully.
The last Pillar reminds us not to forget any of the other four pillars. If any of the other four pillars got overwhelming, began to supress the rest, it calls us for action, to change our rules so that a balance is resetted again. It reminds us on the changing nature of our projects, it appalls on one of our human nature: the nature of exploration, never to stay at one place and think that one had already arrived the end of the world. It calls for the vitality of our projects and everyone of us, to invent, to try new things, to welcome new people, to make new friends.
Die Fünf Säulen
Seit etwa zwei Jahren redete ich verstärkt über Die Fünf Säulen. Es ist schon ein wenig wie "Zurück zum Wurzeln".
Ich wollte meinen Gedanken über diesen Fünf Säulen schon seit einiger Zeit niederschreiben, hatte aber bislang immer nich die Ruhe dafür gefunden. Der Grund dafür lag meistens außerhalb von Wikimedia, meistens wegen sehr intensiven Arbeitstagen, und an den Wochenenden wollte ich mehr Zeit mit meinem Mann verbringen.
Nun habe ich einfach beschlossen, dass dies wichtig ist, und dass ich einfach mir die Zeit dazu nehmen werde, um diesen Essay zu schreiben.
In diesem ersten Beitrag möchte ich mit einer Übersicht über die Beziehungen dieser Fünf Säulen zu einander beginnen, bevor ich dann in den späteren Beiträgen einzeln mit den Säulen beschäftige.
Als Wikipedia gestartet wurde, gab es erst einmal keinen Regeln, keinen Prozessen. Es gab nur diesen fünf Säulen. Wikipedia basierte auf diesen Prinzipien. Aber ich denke, dass mit einigen Anpassungen diese Prinzipien ebenfalls für allen anderen Wikimedia Projekten gelten. Deswegen werde ich hier diesen Fünf Säulen so behandeln, als ob sie nicht nur die Fünf Säulen der Wikipedia sind, sondern dass sie die Fünf Säulen aller Wikimedia Projekte sind.
Grundsätzlich gilt, dass jede dieser Fünf Säulen gleichwertig sind, keine ist die wichtigste. Fehlt eine von ihnen, unsere Projekte würden ganz anders aussehen. Alle dieser Säulen sind auch von einander abhängig. Sie sind sehr eng mit einander verbunden. Wenn wir eine davon ändern, dann ändern wir gleichzeitig auch alle andere, weil wir ihre innige Beziehung ändern werden. Damit werden wir auch unsere Projekte als Ganzes ändern, auf eine fundamentale Art und Weise.
Die Erste Säule reißt den Umfang, Zweck und Inhalt jedes unserer Projekte um. Wikipedia ist eine Enzyklopädie, Wikimedia Commons ist eine Datenbank für freie Medieninhalte, Wikibooks ist eine Sammlung von Lehrbücher, und so weiter und so fort. Jedes Projekt hat eine solche Umfangsdefinition, oder soll eine haben. Sie gibt jedes Projekt ihre Identität, Ihr Sinn fürs Leben.
Die Zweite Säule definiert unseren Platz in der Welt. Die Menschheit ist eine ungeheuer vielfältige und komplizierte Entität. Sie ist volle Freundschaft und auch volle Konflikte. Sie ist volle Ähnlichkeit und volle differenzen. Die Bekräftigung der Neutralität, oder im Fall der Wikiversity, der Aufklärung des Standpunktes, setzt unsere Projekte außerhalb diese Konfliktparteien und Ideologien. Zugleich ist es eine Bekräftigung der Offenheit. Sie besagt, dass jeder, jede Partei, jede Ideologie, hat ihren Platz innerhalb unserer Projekte, jedes von ihnen können in unsere Projekten dargestellt werden.
Die Dritte Säule klärt den Zweck unserer Projekten. Warum machen wir das was wir machen. Auch wenn es immer wieder Verschwörungstheorie gab, gibt und auch geben wird über Verkauf von Wikipedia oder anderen Wikimedia Projekten, dies wird nie passieren, weil es in einem unserer Fundamenten unserer Projekte verankert ist, um genau zu sein, in diese Säule: Wir tut dies alles als freie Inhalte und sie sollen frei bleiben.
Die Vierte Säule ist über unsere innere Organisation. Ein Wiki ist ein interaktives Werkzeug. Interaktiv ist hier nicht Interaktivität zwischen Server (Maschine) und Mensch gemeint, sondern Interaktivität zwischen Menschen gemeint. Die Säule sagt uns wie wir in unseren Projekten mit anderen Menschen umgehen sollen. Sie betont die kollaborative Natur unserer Projekte. Diese kollaborative Natur war es letztendlich auch, die unsere Projekte so groß gemacht hat, nicht die leider manchmal zum Vorschein tretenden kombative Verhalten.
Die letzte Säule erinnert uns, keine der anderen vier Säulen zu vergessen. Wenn eine der vier Säulen an Übergewicht gewinnt und den Rest zu erdrücken droht, ruft sie uns zur Aktion, um unsere Regeln so zu ändern dass das Gleichgewicht wieder hergestellt wird. Sie erinnert uns an den immerwährenden Änderungen unserer Projekte. Sie appelliert an unsere menschliche Natur: die Natur der Erdeckung, nie auf der Stelle treten und denken, wir wären am Ende der Welt angekommen. Sie hält unsere Projekte vital und ermutigt jeden von uns zur Erfindung, neue Sachen auszuprobieren, neue Leute zu wilkommen und neue Freunde zu begegnen.
五大支柱
两年来我在一些演讲（比如在第二届中文维基百科年会上）中经常提到五大支柱。讲它们使我觉得有点像归根结底的感觉。
我想写下我的思路来已经有些时候了，但是我总是没有找到闲心坐下来写。其中的原因主要不在于维基媒体，而在于很繁忙的工作，而在周末我总希望能够多花点时间和男友在一起。
今天我决定这是一件重要的事情，我决定花这个时间来写这篇日记。
在这第一篇日记里我将综述五大支柱之间的关系，在此后的日记中我将仔细描写每一个支柱的意义。
维基百科刚刚开始的时候我们没有任何规则，没有任何程序，当时我们只有这五大支柱。维基百科是在它们的基础上建立的。但是我觉得实际上这些原则经过相应的更改后也适应于所有其它维基媒体项目。因此在这里我不把这五大支柱当作维基百科的五大支柱对待，而是把它们当作所有维基媒体项目的五大支柱。
总的来说这五大支柱是同等的。它们之间没有重要次要之分。缺少它们中的任何一个我们的项目都会面目全非。所有这五大支柱也都是相互关联的，甚至于是紧密关联的。假如我们更改其中之一，我们也就更改了其它四个，因为我们更改了它们之间的关系，从而完全更改了整个项目。
第一根支柱概括了每个项目的范围，目的和内容。维基百科是一部百科全书，维基媒体共享是一个自由媒体内容的数据库，维基教科书收集教科书等等。每个项目应该有这样一个范围概括。它给予每个项目其个性和其生存的意义。
第二根支柱定义我们在世界里的位置。人类是一个非常多样化，非常复杂的事物。它充满了友善，但也充满了敌对。它充满了类似，但也充满了差异。中立性，或者在维基大学中的“揭露立场”置我们的项目于所有这些不同的冲突和主义之外。同时它也是一个开放的表示：它说明任何人、任何党派、任何意识形态在我们的项目中有它们的地方，它们所有都可以在我们的项目中体现自己。
第三根支柱说明我们的项目的用意。想来有各种各样的阴谋论，说维基百科或者其它维基媒体项目会被卖掉，这些阴谋论也许永远也不会相识，但是这样的理论永远也不会变成真的，因为我们的项目中的基础之一，就是这个支柱，说明了：我们创造的是自由的内容，而且这些内容将永远保持自由。
第四个支柱是关于我们内部的组织。维基是一个互动工具。这里说的互动不是人与服务器（机器）之间的互动，而是人与人之间的互动。这个支柱告诉我们我们应该怎样在我们的项目里和其他人互动。它强调了我们的项目的合作本质。这样的合作是使得我们的项目成长的原因，而不是有时我们看到的敌对的行为。
最后一个支柱提醒我们不要忘记另外四个支柱中的任何一个。假如另外四个支柱中有任何一个开始起支配作用了，它呼吁我们行动，更改我们的规则，使得五个支柱中的平衡被重建。它提醒我们我们的项目是在不断变化的，它呼吁我们的人类本性：探索的本性，永远不停在一个地方，以为我们已经走遍天涯了。它呼吁我们项目的活力，它呼吁我们不断更新，不断试验，不断欢迎新的人参加，不断结识新的朋友。
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
Board Resolution: Openness
Dear community,
on the IRC board meeting at April 8th 2011 the board approved unanimously the following resolution:
We, the Wikimedia Foundation Board, believe that the continued health of our project communities is crucial to fulfilling our mission. The Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness, participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors.
As laid out in our five-year Strategic Plan, and emphasized by these findings, Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse editors, and to retain our experienced editors. A stable editing community is critical to the long-term sustainability and quality of both our current Projects and our movement.
We consider meeting this challenge our top priority. We ask all contributors to think about these issues in your daily work on the Projects.
We support the Executive Director in making this the top staff priority, and recommend she increase the allocation of Foundation resources towards addressing this problem, through community outreach, amplification of community efforts, and technical improvements.
And we support the developers, editors, wikiprojects and Chapters that are working to make the projects more accessible, welcoming, and supportive.
The Board resolves to help move these efforts forward, and invites specific requests for Foundation assistance to do so. We welcome and encourage new ideas to help reach our goals of openness and broader participation.
We urge the Wikimedia community to promote openness and collaboration, by:
* Treating new editors with patience, kindness, and respect; being aware of the challenges facing new editors, and reaching out to them; and encouraging others to do the same;
* Improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion;
* Supporting the development and rollout of features and tools that improve usability and accessibility;
* Increasing community awareness of these issues and supporting outreach efforts of individuals, groups and Chapters;
* Working with colleagues to reduce contention and promote a friendlier, more collaborative culture, including more thanking and affirmation; and encouraging best practices and community leaders; and
* Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers.
Resources
Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary
2011 Editor Trends Study (Executive Director's summary, ideas)
on the IRC board meeting at April 8th 2011 the board approved unanimously the following resolution:
We, the Wikimedia Foundation Board, believe that the continued health of our project communities is crucial to fulfilling our mission. The Wikimedia projects are founded in the culture of openness, participation, and quality that has created one of the world's great repositories of human knowledge. But while Wikimedia's readers and supporters are growing around the world, recent studies of editor trends show a steady decline in the participation and retention of new editors.
As laid out in our five-year Strategic Plan, and emphasized by these findings, Wikimedia needs to attract and retain more new and diverse editors, and to retain our experienced editors. A stable editing community is critical to the long-term sustainability and quality of both our current Projects and our movement.
We consider meeting this challenge our top priority. We ask all contributors to think about these issues in your daily work on the Projects.
We support the Executive Director in making this the top staff priority, and recommend she increase the allocation of Foundation resources towards addressing this problem, through community outreach, amplification of community efforts, and technical improvements.
And we support the developers, editors, wikiprojects and Chapters that are working to make the projects more accessible, welcoming, and supportive.
The Board resolves to help move these efforts forward, and invites specific requests for Foundation assistance to do so. We welcome and encourage new ideas to help reach our goals of openness and broader participation.
We urge the Wikimedia community to promote openness and collaboration, by:
* Treating new editors with patience, kindness, and respect; being aware of the challenges facing new editors, and reaching out to them; and encouraging others to do the same;
* Improving communication on the projects; simplifying policy and instructions; and working with colleagues to improve and make friendlier policies and practices regarding templates, warnings, and deletion;
* Supporting the development and rollout of features and tools that improve usability and accessibility;
* Increasing community awareness of these issues and supporting outreach efforts of individuals, groups and Chapters;
* Working with colleagues to reduce contention and promote a friendlier, more collaborative culture, including more thanking and affirmation; and encouraging best practices and community leaders; and
* Working with colleagues to develop practices to discourage disruptive and hostile behavior, and repel trolls and stalkers.
Resources
Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary
2011 Editor Trends Study (Executive Director's summary, ideas)
Sunday, March 27, 2011
message to community about community decline
Deutsche Version
中文版本
Dear all:
The Wikimedia Board of Trustees just completed its two-day meeting this weekend in Berlin. We devoted the longest time to discussing declining trends in editing activity and our collective response to it. I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update, and the editor trends study itself. It is a deeply important topic, and each report is only a few pages long.
The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing our movement. We would encourage the whole movement - the communities, wikiprojects, Chapters, Board, Foundation staff - to think about ways to meet this challenge. We know many contributors care about this and have worked on outreach and hospitality in past years. We are considering how we can help make such work more effective, and ask for suggestions from the community to this problem now and to invite discussion and suggestions.
Greetings, Ting
Botschaft an die Community über Benutzerschwund
das Kuratorium der Wikimedia Foundation hatte gerade ihr zweitägiges Treffen in Berlin hinter sich. Das Thema, an dem wir die meiste Zeit verwendet haben, war der Trend der schwindenden Editaktivität sowie unseren kollektiven Reaktion darauf. Ich möchte an diese Stelle jeden dazu ermuntern, Sues März Update und die Untersuchung zu reviewen. Es ist ein sehr sehr wichtiges Thema, und diesen Reports sind nur einigen Seiten lang.
Das Kuratorium denkt dass dies ist eine signifikante Herausforderung, die unsere Bewegung entgegentritt. Wir möchten die gesamte Bewegung - die Communities, die Projekten, die Chapters, das Kuratorium selbst, die Angestellten der Foundation - über Wege nachdenken, wie wir diese Herausforderung entgegentreten können. Wir wissen dass für vielen unserer Freiwilligen das ein wichtige Thema ist und dass sie in den vergangenen Jahren konstant an Freundlichkeit und Erweiterung unserer Community gearbeitet haben. Wir überlegen gerade wie wir dazu beitragen können, damit diese Arbeit effektiver werden, und wir möchten die Community um Vorschlägen und Hilfe bitten, um dieses Problem zu lösen, und Euch allen einladen, daüber zu diskutieren und Vorschlägen einzureichen.
维基媒体基金会理事会就社群缩小问题致社群的信
大家好：
这个周末维基媒体基金会理事会在柏林开会。我们讨论最长的问题是社群编辑缩小的趋势以及我们应该怎样一起对待这个问题。我想在这里邀请所有朋友阅读一下苏·加德纳的三月报告以及基金会的研究数据。这些内容和数据都是极其重要的，而且每个报告都只有数页的长度。
理事会认为这是维基媒体运动目前面临的最重要的挑战。我们想勉励整个运动——社群、项目、分会、理事会和基金会的职员——考虑我们怎样面临这个挑战。我们知道在过去我们始终有许多志愿者对这个问题非常关心，他们始终在努力工作，来使得我们的项目和社群更加友好，更加富有吸引力。我们在考虑我们怎样能够为他们提供帮助，使得他们的努力更加有效。因此我们向社群征求建议。请参加讨论和向我们提供你们的主意（您也可以用中文参加讨论和提供建议）。
谢谢大家
霆
中文版本
Dear all:
The Wikimedia Board of Trustees just completed its two-day meeting this weekend in Berlin. We devoted the longest time to discussing declining trends in editing activity and our collective response to it. I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update, and the editor trends study itself. It is a deeply important topic, and each report is only a few pages long.
The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing our movement. We would encourage the whole movement - the communities, wikiprojects, Chapters, Board, Foundation staff - to think about ways to meet this challenge. We know many contributors care about this and have worked on outreach and hospitality in past years. We are considering how we can help make such work more effective, and ask for suggestions from the community to this problem now and to invite discussion and suggestions.
Greetings, Ting
Botschaft an die Community über Benutzerschwund
das Kuratorium der Wikimedia Foundation hatte gerade ihr zweitägiges Treffen in Berlin hinter sich. Das Thema, an dem wir die meiste Zeit verwendet haben, war der Trend der schwindenden Editaktivität sowie unseren kollektiven Reaktion darauf. Ich möchte an diese Stelle jeden dazu ermuntern, Sues März Update und die Untersuchung zu reviewen. Es ist ein sehr sehr wichtiges Thema, und diesen Reports sind nur einigen Seiten lang.
Das Kuratorium denkt dass dies ist eine signifikante Herausforderung, die unsere Bewegung entgegentritt. Wir möchten die gesamte Bewegung - die Communities, die Projekten, die Chapters, das Kuratorium selbst, die Angestellten der Foundation - über Wege nachdenken, wie wir diese Herausforderung entgegentreten können. Wir wissen dass für vielen unserer Freiwilligen das ein wichtige Thema ist und dass sie in den vergangenen Jahren konstant an Freundlichkeit und Erweiterung unserer Community gearbeitet haben. Wir überlegen gerade wie wir dazu beitragen können, damit diese Arbeit effektiver werden, und wir möchten die Community um Vorschlägen und Hilfe bitten, um dieses Problem zu lösen, und Euch allen einladen, daüber zu diskutieren und Vorschlägen einzureichen.
维基媒体基金会理事会就社群缩小问题致社群的信
大家好：
这个周末维基媒体基金会理事会在柏林开会。我们讨论最长的问题是社群编辑缩小的趋势以及我们应该怎样一起对待这个问题。我想在这里邀请所有朋友阅读一下苏·加德纳的三月报告以及基金会的研究数据。这些内容和数据都是极其重要的，而且每个报告都只有数页的长度。
理事会认为这是维基媒体运动目前面临的最重要的挑战。我们想勉励整个运动——社群、项目、分会、理事会和基金会的职员——考虑我们怎样面临这个挑战。我们知道在过去我们始终有许多志愿者对这个问题非常关心，他们始终在努力工作，来使得我们的项目和社群更加友好，更加富有吸引力。我们在考虑我们怎样能够为他们提供帮助，使得他们的努力更加有效。因此我们向社群征求建议。请参加讨论和向我们提供你们的主意（您也可以用中文参加讨论和提供建议）。
谢谢大家
霆
Monday, January 17, 2011
Why is Editing Wikipedia Cool
This is the draft of my speech in Nairobi to the students at the Strathmore University on the Wikipedia Ten Anniversary and one day later at the Inoorera University. At Innorera University I didn't had a projector, but I used the white board to illustrate the key points.
[Slide One]
Thank you very much [who ever makes the introduction]
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for give me the chance to speak here. It is for me a tremendous honor to be here, in Kenya, not only because it is since a very long time a dream for me to visit the continent and the country where the ancestors of all mankind once lived, but also because in my deepest believe, Africa, and with it Kenya, bears not only the past of humanity, but also the future of it. A lot of people talk now a day about China or the pacific rim area. But what is China in comparison with a continent so full of richness. And the most important richness on this continent is its people. Its people full of mind, ideas, intelligence, wit and knowledge.
So this is the reason why I am here to make this presentation. I would like to talk about knowledge, the most powerful resource you have.
[Slide Two]
At first let me introduce myself briefly. I was born in China, actually in Shanghai. I grew up in Northern China, in a City with the name Harbin. In 1988 in age of 20 I went to Germany to visit university. After my graduation I remained there. In my professional life I am an IT Specialist by IBM. Since 2008 I am elected by the editing community as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Since 2010 I am the chair's person of the board. Although the Foundation has meanwhile about 50 employees, its board is a totally volunteer's board. So the board work and Wikipedia work is my main hobby and I certainly spend most of my time on it.
Where ever I meet other people and say this people tend to ask: What is the Wikimedia Foundation and what relation does it have with Wikipedia? The most strait forward answer of this question is we operate Wikipedia. We are not Wikipedia, although much of our employees are Wikipedians, we give Wikipedia its institutional and technical support.
[Slide Three]
Wikipedia went online at January 15th 2001. So in a few days we will celebrate its 10th birthday. I became Wikipedia two years later, in January 2003. During the past ten years Wikipedia had grown from a curiosity into one of the most important information resource of the world. So at the moment we have in total more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages. For many languages it is the first encyclopedia in that language at all. The data of last October says that we have had 400 million individual users globally using Wikipedia and its sister projects. And most important of all Wikipedia is free. You can use it for free, you don't need to pay it. You can reuse it for free, as long as you keep the content with the Creative Commons license agreement. Under the same condition you can even use it for business. And exactly this is mission of the Wikimedia Foundation: To encourage and empower people all around the world to share educational knowledge, freely, in their own language.
Ten years is a very long time for Internet. There were famous websites like Geocities ten years ago that doesn't exist now, and a lot of websites that are now famous like Facebook were not there ten years ago. So, how did we do in the last ten years? Did we arrived our mission?
No, in my opinion we are still far far away from our goal. And we are so far far away, among others, because we need you to help us. Without your help we will never fulfill our mission. And this is the reason why I am here. I am here to ask you to help us.
[Slide Four]
So what I really want to ask you and to invite you to do is join us in the editing community of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Why should you do it? Why should anyone do such a thing? Spend many many hours to work on something completely free?
Let's see what the folks say about it
[Nice People video]
There are a lot of reasons, and there are four reasons that I think are most important:
Edit Wikipedia is good for you
Edit Wikipedia is good for Kenya
Edit Wikipedia is good for Africa and
Edit Wikipedia is good for the World.
[Slide Five]
Why is editing Wikipedia good for you?
First of all, because you can learn a lot from this experience. It is not easy to write a new article. You must learn a lot of things. For example we want to write an article about this school / university / whatever, how would you start? Let's see how we start: School soandso is a middle school at the center of Nairobi. And then? What is its history? When is it founded, who founded it? Why was it founded? How many students did it have when it was founded? How many teachers? How was the condition at that time? Who was the first director? Which major events happened in its history? Now what is the situation today? How many students has it now? How many teachers? Who is its director now? What can the students learn here? Is there anything from it that distinguishes it from other colleges? Is there any plans of the school for the future? Are there any notable alumni from the school? Are there any remarkable achievements from its students? You see, to write an article is surely not very easy. Even if you are a student or a teacher in this school, you may find more interesting things about it you didn't know until now. To write a good article you need to do more. Maybe you want to research in archives, or other sources, and you may find other interesting things about which you want to do further researches. You can become an expert of the history of this school if you want to spend the time and energy on it.
Maybe you would say, well, I am not that good in write articles, and I don't have so much nerve to research all these details. But you can also do small edits and learn a lot of new things. You can simply start with a topic you are interested in, maybe a movie. And click on a link about an actor who played in that movie and maybe another interesting movie with him, and something that was mentioned in that movie. And thereby you may notice small errors in the articles, a word is spelled wrong, a sentence more sound terrible. Correct them. The next reader will be very thankful for that and you can learn a lot of new things you are interested in.
Maybe you are interested in translating articles, from another language in yours. Translating is a very useful skill, and it is a skill need to be trained. I myself translate a lot. Most of my own work is translating. And one of the most proud article I ever wrote is a translation of the article about the Bantu language group into Chinese. Here it is, how it looks like a description about the the Bantu languages in Chinese. And I must say I enjoyed a lot in this work, and learned a lot about these wonderful languages during this work, about which I had no clue at all earlier. And read this, wow, it is already a poem although it is something so normal.
So, you see, by sharing your knowledge you can learn a lot about other people's knowledge. It is a giving and taking. And beyond that you can learn a lot of other things. Like virtually work with other people, cooperate with other people online. Discuss with them about differences and issues.
Another thing which you will learn very fast is the work of the media. Do you trust Wikipedia? Do you trust newspaper, or television? You will find it out when you begin to work with them while you are searching for references and sources. And you will find it out while you are yourself publishing in Wikipedia.
All these skills are very valuable, not only for now, to be fun, but also for your future. If one day you are working in a company, maybe an international company, these are all skills that will do you a lot favor.
[Slide Six]
Why is Editing Wikipedia good for Kenya? Because you will tell the world how Kenya is, how is this land, its people, its culture. Who can do this better than you, who live here everyday? Don't let other people, who only know this land though Internet, newspaper or television to write about this land, write about this land yourself, and tell the world how it is here.
As I said above, by editing Wikipedia it is a taking and giving. It is not a one-way-street. You tell the world about Kenya, and you can learn about the world at the same time. Maybe you want to translate interesting things into your mother tongue, so that also people who don't speak English can learn about that thing.
And maybe you want are working on a language version of Wikipedia in your mother tongue. And by doing so, maybe you are helping to create the first encyclopedia in that language. Maybe you can write down traditions, places, peoples in that language and you or someone else can later translate it into other languages. You can help keep these knowledges not lost someday.
And the final point is you can improve the view point of Kenya. So we have five pillars on Wikipedia, these are the five most fundamental rules with which we work. And one of these five pillars is the Neutral Point of View, which doesn't mean we don't present view point at all, but that we present all view points. But as you know Wikipedia is written by people like you and me. So if there are only Europeans or Americans write about a topic, there will only European and American view points presented on that article. Let's take an example. Let's look at the article “Global Warming” on the English Wikipedia.
[Global Warming Example]
So here you are, and here you see a section with the name “View on Global Warming”. So let's see, there we are. You see we have different views about this topic presented. And here are the sources where these views come from. And you see UK, you see New York Times, you see Deutsche Bank etc. But you don't see Africa, you don't see Kenya. So what is Kenya's view about Global Warming? What do your political, financial, scientific, media leader say about Global Warming? That is something we need on Wikipedia. We need a more neutral point of view, so we need also Kenya's view about a lot of things.
[Slide Seven]
Why is Editing Wikipedia good for Africa?
First of all, it is knowledge that matters. Maybe you had already heard a lot of people talking about this century would be the century of Pacific rim. Do you think so? I will show you an image I saw two days before I came here.
See the proportions.
And think what do you need, for this continent?
You need knowledge, you need to write down your own knowledge, and you need the knowledge of the world, and you need knowledge from each other, from all the people who live on this continent.
Knowledge is the most valuable resource, and a resource no one can take or buy away from you.
You know, I mainly work on Chinese Wikipedia. The Chinese Wikipedian community is very diverse. We have folks from mainland China, we have people from Hong Kong and Macao, we have people from Taiwan and we have oversea Chinese like me, who had lived a very long time outside of China. And we have very different opinions to some of the topics. For example is Taiwan an independent country?
Maybe you can imagine how politicians work on such differences. They will threat each other with wars.
We Wikipedians work differently. We will discuss to each other and work out a way where every view point is presented in a neutral and not agitating language. A lot of problems in the world is not easy to solve. The worst solution is to use simple and agitating answers so that people get emotional and get aggressive. The best solutions is when people can understand the problem thoroughly and can understand each other. And this is how Wikipedia want to work, this is how Wikipedia want to present to the world.
Knowledge is peace, because if you know what other people think, what is their problem, and they know what you think and what is your problem, this is the basis upon which you can solve your problems together. Without those knowledge the others behave strange and looks evil. With those knowledge, they are also human like you and me.
So, work together, for a strong and peaceful Africa.
[Slide Eight]
Why is you editing Wikipedia good for the world?
Because the world need to know more about Africa, about Kenya, about you. I believe two years ago I read somewhere that there are more Wikipedia articles on English Wikipedia about New York City than about the whole continent Africa. I don't know if that was true and if that is still true. But the proportion that Africa is represented on Wikipedia is definitively too small.
Kenya is the cradle of the mankind. People lived here for hundred thousands of years. You have a deep, deep, deep profound resource, and that is buried in your culture, in all the knowledge and heritage you carry with you. And no one on the world can do better by sharing this knowledge with the world.
And you can work together with not only people from your neighborhoods, from your neighbor countries, but from the whole world. And nothing brings people together more than work together, build together and share together. There's no way for you, for me, for other people, to learn each other better than to cooperate and work together.
This is why we need you to help us, and that is why it is good for you, for Kenya, for Africa and for the world.
[Slide Nine]
Wikipedia is only one of several project the Wikimedia Foundation is running. As I had said before. The mission of the Foundation is to encourage and empower people to collect and share educational content. Encyclopedia is only one form of educational content. So, if you don't want to work on an encyclopedia, you can work on a dictionary, or work on textbooks, I would for example like to see a good textbook about learn Swahili, or another Bantu language. I think they are so beautiful. Other examples are working on news. We need more news from Kenya and from Africa generally. If you are very interested in photography, you can work on Wikimedia Commons. I know quite some Wikimedians who started to take photos for Wikipedia, improved their skills constantly and become semi-professional photographers.
So, there are lots of possibilities.
I will now show you another small video
[Edit Button video]
So, I hope you will also find the fascination of the Edit-Button and we can meet soon on the projects.
Thank you very much
[Thank you slide]
[Slide One]
Thank you very much [who ever makes the introduction]
Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen for give me the chance to speak here. It is for me a tremendous honor to be here, in Kenya, not only because it is since a very long time a dream for me to visit the continent and the country where the ancestors of all mankind once lived, but also because in my deepest believe, Africa, and with it Kenya, bears not only the past of humanity, but also the future of it. A lot of people talk now a day about China or the pacific rim area. But what is China in comparison with a continent so full of richness. And the most important richness on this continent is its people. Its people full of mind, ideas, intelligence, wit and knowledge.
So this is the reason why I am here to make this presentation. I would like to talk about knowledge, the most powerful resource you have.
[Slide Two]
At first let me introduce myself briefly. I was born in China, actually in Shanghai. I grew up in Northern China, in a City with the name Harbin. In 1988 in age of 20 I went to Germany to visit university. After my graduation I remained there. In my professional life I am an IT Specialist by IBM. Since 2008 I am elected by the editing community as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Since 2010 I am the chair's person of the board. Although the Foundation has meanwhile about 50 employees, its board is a totally volunteer's board. So the board work and Wikipedia work is my main hobby and I certainly spend most of my time on it.
Where ever I meet other people and say this people tend to ask: What is the Wikimedia Foundation and what relation does it have with Wikipedia? The most strait forward answer of this question is we operate Wikipedia. We are not Wikipedia, although much of our employees are Wikipedians, we give Wikipedia its institutional and technical support.
[Slide Three]
Wikipedia went online at January 15th 2001. So in a few days we will celebrate its 10th birthday. I became Wikipedia two years later, in January 2003. During the past ten years Wikipedia had grown from a curiosity into one of the most important information resource of the world. So at the moment we have in total more than 17 million articles in more than 270 languages. For many languages it is the first encyclopedia in that language at all. The data of last October says that we have had 400 million individual users globally using Wikipedia and its sister projects. And most important of all Wikipedia is free. You can use it for free, you don't need to pay it. You can reuse it for free, as long as you keep the content with the Creative Commons license agreement. Under the same condition you can even use it for business. And exactly this is mission of the Wikimedia Foundation: To encourage and empower people all around the world to share educational knowledge, freely, in their own language.
Ten years is a very long time for Internet. There were famous websites like Geocities ten years ago that doesn't exist now, and a lot of websites that are now famous like Facebook were not there ten years ago. So, how did we do in the last ten years? Did we arrived our mission?
No, in my opinion we are still far far away from our goal. And we are so far far away, among others, because we need you to help us. Without your help we will never fulfill our mission. And this is the reason why I am here. I am here to ask you to help us.
[Slide Four]
So what I really want to ask you and to invite you to do is join us in the editing community of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Why should you do it? Why should anyone do such a thing? Spend many many hours to work on something completely free?
Let's see what the folks say about it
[Nice People video]
There are a lot of reasons, and there are four reasons that I think are most important:
Edit Wikipedia is good for you
Edit Wikipedia is good for Kenya
Edit Wikipedia is good for Africa and
Edit Wikipedia is good for the World.
[Slide Five]
Why is editing Wikipedia good for you?
First of all, because you can learn a lot from this experience. It is not easy to write a new article. You must learn a lot of things. For example we want to write an article about this school / university / whatever, how would you start? Let's see how we start: School soandso is a middle school at the center of Nairobi. And then? What is its history? When is it founded, who founded it? Why was it founded? How many students did it have when it was founded? How many teachers? How was the condition at that time? Who was the first director? Which major events happened in its history? Now what is the situation today? How many students has it now? How many teachers? Who is its director now? What can the students learn here? Is there anything from it that distinguishes it from other colleges? Is there any plans of the school for the future? Are there any notable alumni from the school? Are there any remarkable achievements from its students? You see, to write an article is surely not very easy. Even if you are a student or a teacher in this school, you may find more interesting things about it you didn't know until now. To write a good article you need to do more. Maybe you want to research in archives, or other sources, and you may find other interesting things about which you want to do further researches. You can become an expert of the history of this school if you want to spend the time and energy on it.
Maybe you would say, well, I am not that good in write articles, and I don't have so much nerve to research all these details. But you can also do small edits and learn a lot of new things. You can simply start with a topic you are interested in, maybe a movie. And click on a link about an actor who played in that movie and maybe another interesting movie with him, and something that was mentioned in that movie. And thereby you may notice small errors in the articles, a word is spelled wrong, a sentence more sound terrible. Correct them. The next reader will be very thankful for that and you can learn a lot of new things you are interested in.
Maybe you are interested in translating articles, from another language in yours. Translating is a very useful skill, and it is a skill need to be trained. I myself translate a lot. Most of my own work is translating. And one of the most proud article I ever wrote is a translation of the article about the Bantu language group into Chinese. Here it is, how it looks like a description about the the Bantu languages in Chinese. And I must say I enjoyed a lot in this work, and learned a lot about these wonderful languages during this work, about which I had no clue at all earlier. And read this, wow, it is already a poem although it is something so normal.
So, you see, by sharing your knowledge you can learn a lot about other people's knowledge. It is a giving and taking. And beyond that you can learn a lot of other things. Like virtually work with other people, cooperate with other people online. Discuss with them about differences and issues.
Another thing which you will learn very fast is the work of the media. Do you trust Wikipedia? Do you trust newspaper, or television? You will find it out when you begin to work with them while you are searching for references and sources. And you will find it out while you are yourself publishing in Wikipedia.
All these skills are very valuable, not only for now, to be fun, but also for your future. If one day you are working in a company, maybe an international company, these are all skills that will do you a lot favor.
[Slide Six]
Why is Editing Wikipedia good for Kenya? Because you will tell the world how Kenya is, how is this land, its people, its culture. Who can do this better than you, who live here everyday? Don't let other people, who only know this land though Internet, newspaper or television to write about this land, write about this land yourself, and tell the world how it is here.
As I said above, by editing Wikipedia it is a taking and giving. It is not a one-way-street. You tell the world about Kenya, and you can learn about the world at the same time. Maybe you want to translate interesting things into your mother tongue, so that also people who don't speak English can learn about that thing.
And maybe you want are working on a language version of Wikipedia in your mother tongue. And by doing so, maybe you are helping to create the first encyclopedia in that language. Maybe you can write down traditions, places, peoples in that language and you or someone else can later translate it into other languages. You can help keep these knowledges not lost someday.
And the final point is you can improve the view point of Kenya. So we have five pillars on Wikipedia, these are the five most fundamental rules with which we work. And one of these five pillars is the Neutral Point of View, which doesn't mean we don't present view point at all, but that we present all view points. But as you know Wikipedia is written by people like you and me. So if there are only Europeans or Americans write about a topic, there will only European and American view points presented on that article. Let's take an example. Let's look at the article “Global Warming” on the English Wikipedia.
[Global Warming Example]
So here you are, and here you see a section with the name “View on Global Warming”. So let's see, there we are. You see we have different views about this topic presented. And here are the sources where these views come from. And you see UK, you see New York Times, you see Deutsche Bank etc. But you don't see Africa, you don't see Kenya. So what is Kenya's view about Global Warming? What do your political, financial, scientific, media leader say about Global Warming? That is something we need on Wikipedia. We need a more neutral point of view, so we need also Kenya's view about a lot of things.
[Slide Seven]
Why is Editing Wikipedia good for Africa?
First of all, it is knowledge that matters. Maybe you had already heard a lot of people talking about this century would be the century of Pacific rim. Do you think so? I will show you an image I saw two days before I came here.
See the proportions.
And think what do you need, for this continent?
You need knowledge, you need to write down your own knowledge, and you need the knowledge of the world, and you need knowledge from each other, from all the people who live on this continent.
Knowledge is the most valuable resource, and a resource no one can take or buy away from you.
You know, I mainly work on Chinese Wikipedia. The Chinese Wikipedian community is very diverse. We have folks from mainland China, we have people from Hong Kong and Macao, we have people from Taiwan and we have oversea Chinese like me, who had lived a very long time outside of China. And we have very different opinions to some of the topics. For example is Taiwan an independent country?
Maybe you can imagine how politicians work on such differences. They will threat each other with wars.
We Wikipedians work differently. We will discuss to each other and work out a way where every view point is presented in a neutral and not agitating language. A lot of problems in the world is not easy to solve. The worst solution is to use simple and agitating answers so that people get emotional and get aggressive. The best solutions is when people can understand the problem thoroughly and can understand each other. And this is how Wikipedia want to work, this is how Wikipedia want to present to the world.
Knowledge is peace, because if you know what other people think, what is their problem, and they know what you think and what is your problem, this is the basis upon which you can solve your problems together. Without those knowledge the others behave strange and looks evil. With those knowledge, they are also human like you and me.
So, work together, for a strong and peaceful Africa.
[Slide Eight]
Why is you editing Wikipedia good for the world?
Because the world need to know more about Africa, about Kenya, about you. I believe two years ago I read somewhere that there are more Wikipedia articles on English Wikipedia about New York City than about the whole continent Africa. I don't know if that was true and if that is still true. But the proportion that Africa is represented on Wikipedia is definitively too small.
Kenya is the cradle of the mankind. People lived here for hundred thousands of years. You have a deep, deep, deep profound resource, and that is buried in your culture, in all the knowledge and heritage you carry with you. And no one on the world can do better by sharing this knowledge with the world.
And you can work together with not only people from your neighborhoods, from your neighbor countries, but from the whole world. And nothing brings people together more than work together, build together and share together. There's no way for you, for me, for other people, to learn each other better than to cooperate and work together.
This is why we need you to help us, and that is why it is good for you, for Kenya, for Africa and for the world.
[Slide Nine]
Wikipedia is only one of several project the Wikimedia Foundation is running. As I had said before. The mission of the Foundation is to encourage and empower people to collect and share educational content. Encyclopedia is only one form of educational content. So, if you don't want to work on an encyclopedia, you can work on a dictionary, or work on textbooks, I would for example like to see a good textbook about learn Swahili, or another Bantu language. I think they are so beautiful. Other examples are working on news. We need more news from Kenya and from Africa generally. If you are very interested in photography, you can work on Wikimedia Commons. I know quite some Wikimedians who started to take photos for Wikipedia, improved their skills constantly and become semi-professional photographers.
So, there are lots of possibilities.
I will now show you another small video
[Edit Button video]
So, I hope you will also find the fascination of the Edit-Button and we can meet soon on the projects.
Thank you very much
[Thank you slide]
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Scale up
At the last day of the HBS course there are two cases about organizational scale ups. The first case was about an international nonprofit organization, which has the strongest similarity to WMF from all the cases. Organizational changes often mean a lot of stress inside of the organization.
Shortly after the Foundation was established the first chapters were created. In the following time both the Foundation, the chapters and other formal and informal groups grew up in a more or less organic way. In the past time we are more and more confronted with questions like: Who has which roles? Whom can we expect for what? Who has which duty?
Because our structures are so grassroot and so organical created, it poses some difficulty now to sort all these questions out. This is the reason why the board initiated the Movement Roles workgroup. It is a very important workgroup and its work will have influence on the organisation of the Foundation, the chapters and other friendly or informal groups. Because of this it is very very important, both for the Foundation, as well as the groups that would be potentially affected, to take part in this process, make their suggestions and work together.
At the end of the four days I would say that the course was a good investment for the Foundation. Even though the cases seem to be far distant from our own situation at the first glance, I inevitably discovers again and again similar situations and principles. We got some framework on how to analyse situations systematically, but more of that is that we got excercises in a lot of situations which can face a nonprofit organization in how to concentrate on the most important part of the board work: remain calm, always keep the mission in mind, and communicate.
The course was very intensive. Everyday we studied three to four cases. Every case had a discription of about in average 30 pages. The day started at 7:30 with groupwork on the cases of the day and ends at about 17:00. But that doesn't mean the end of day. On the receptions afterward and on dinner table discussion would go on and on. After I closed my door in the dorm and started my recapitulation about the next days course.
Although the days were very tough, I never felt sleepy in the classrooms because it was so interesting, so challenging and so engaging. I only noticed how tired I got went at the end of the day I shut off the light and fall almost instantly into sleep.
Preparation is important for the course. Who go to the course without studied the cases beforehand would find himself lost quite soon. Because the cases are all quite complicated and long, one need to cross read them one day before again so that the details can come back into the memory.
Shortly after the Foundation was established the first chapters were created. In the following time both the Foundation, the chapters and other formal and informal groups grew up in a more or less organic way. In the past time we are more and more confronted with questions like: Who has which roles? Whom can we expect for what? Who has which duty?
Because our structures are so grassroot and so organical created, it poses some difficulty now to sort all these questions out. This is the reason why the board initiated the Movement Roles workgroup. It is a very important workgroup and its work will have influence on the organisation of the Foundation, the chapters and other friendly or informal groups. Because of this it is very very important, both for the Foundation, as well as the groups that would be potentially affected, to take part in this process, make their suggestions and work together.
At the end of the four days I would say that the course was a good investment for the Foundation. Even though the cases seem to be far distant from our own situation at the first glance, I inevitably discovers again and again similar situations and principles. We got some framework on how to analyse situations systematically, but more of that is that we got excercises in a lot of situations which can face a nonprofit organization in how to concentrate on the most important part of the board work: remain calm, always keep the mission in mind, and communicate.
The course was very intensive. Everyday we studied three to four cases. Every case had a discription of about in average 30 pages. The day started at 7:30 with groupwork on the cases of the day and ends at about 17:00. But that doesn't mean the end of day. On the receptions afterward and on dinner table discussion would go on and on. After I closed my door in the dorm and started my recapitulation about the next days course.
Although the days were very tough, I never felt sleepy in the classrooms because it was so interesting, so challenging and so engaging. I only noticed how tired I got went at the end of the day I shut off the light and fall almost instantly into sleep.
Preparation is important for the course. Who go to the course without studied the cases beforehand would find himself lost quite soon. Because the cases are all quite complicated and long, one need to cross read them one day before again so that the details can come back into the memory.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Theory of Change
One of the most discussed problem on the 4-day HBS course "Governing for Nonprofit Excellence", both on the course as well as off the course, is how to measure the impact of a strategy, an organization and how to measure the performance of an organization as well as its parts.
It is one of the most interested questions by almost all attendees. And it is also important for the WikiMedia Foundation.
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question, not even from HBS.
The researchers at HBS consider the question in a very systematic way: At first, every organization has outputs. Outputs are things an organization can influence directly with its strategy and action. And they can be measured directly. In comparison to the outputs are outcomes. In HBS jargon outcomes are effects of an organization with their output. It is less in control of the organization, it is more a public effect. The sum of all outcomes are called impact by the HBS researchers.
For the WikiMedia Foundation, the number of articles is an obvious output. In issuing different policies we can (or can try to) influence this output. It is easy to measure. WikiMedia has a lot of such measurable values, like length of articles, article depth, visitor counts, etc. These are all what we often call metrics when we are discussing on our mailing-list or in the projects.
As everyone of us know, who had took part in these discussions, these metrics are no good measurements. The reason from them to be not good is that one can interpret them in a lot of ways. And they do not necessarily correlate with the outcome we wish.
The outcome we want to achieve is higher quality of our articles, more penetration of our projects, more participation of our users, more diversity of our projects, etc. And these are not so easy to measure.
Let's take the example of article quality. I know discussion about article quality since I joined our editing community. How can you design a measurement for so much articles in more than 270 languages in topics as different as top quark and Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva? The most obvious suggestion is article length. But the sole length of an article doesn't really reflect the quality of an article. An article could be very long, but still badly structured, poorly referenced and contains strong point of view. The article depth is a more sophisticated approach which treats a language version as a whole and tries to calculate how often the articles are updated. Beside technical and methodological problems there are also other difficulties in measuring quality. The perception for a good article and a bad article can differ between the editing community, the general public and experts of their fields. Each of these groups can have different criteria for quality of articles. For example the general public may value an article as higher quality because it is more comprehensible, but comprehensible may mean for an expert explanations that contain more ambivalent and misleading analogues.
Because of the difficulty of measurement of outcomes there is often a big gap between the measurable output of an organization and its impact. This problem is annoying for most of nonprofit organizations and highly uncomfortable for their boards. Nevertheless most of the organizations believe that they achieve impact with their work. The HBS researchers call this believe Theory of Change. It is a hypothetical and in many cases unproved theory about if we do this, than we will change the society in that way, and that would lead to the fulfillment of our mission. Most strategies of nonprofit organizations are based on theories of change.
So the theory of change of article length is that longer articles tend to contain more information, tend to be more thorough and thus of higher quality. The theory of change of article depth is that if more updates are done on a language version, then we can assume that the articles are more up-to-date, and more failures are corrected by the editing community, and thus better articles.
But as the many discussions in the past and current suggest these are all hypothetical theories and we don't really know.
The best way to proof the theory of change is to measure the outcome. As I had already written before, this is not easy. In many cases the organization also has no resource in know-how, man power and money to conduct a measurement or survey. The WikiMedia Foundation and our communities had in the past conducted a score of experiments and methods to measure the quality:
The featured article is doubtless the most successful of these. It is a measurement from the view of our editing community for high quality articles. Across all projects the threshold for featured articles are very high. With the public policy project WikiMedia Foundation began in the last months a test on user feed backs about quality from the reader perception. Although there were some outside evaluations with experts like those conducted by Nature or c't, these evaluations are often of too small a scale and not consistent enough to give us an overall trend over the years and across the language versions, or in more general fields.
So one of our major tasks in the coming years is still to find a way to bridge some gaps of theory of change. And one of the tasks of the board would be to engage our community and outside experts to free their resources and expertise to help us in this endeavor.
It is one of the most interested questions by almost all attendees. And it is also important for the WikiMedia Foundation.
Unfortunately, there is no easy answer to this question, not even from HBS.
The researchers at HBS consider the question in a very systematic way: At first, every organization has outputs. Outputs are things an organization can influence directly with its strategy and action. And they can be measured directly. In comparison to the outputs are outcomes. In HBS jargon outcomes are effects of an organization with their output. It is less in control of the organization, it is more a public effect. The sum of all outcomes are called impact by the HBS researchers.
For the WikiMedia Foundation, the number of articles is an obvious output. In issuing different policies we can (or can try to) influence this output. It is easy to measure. WikiMedia has a lot of such measurable values, like length of articles, article depth, visitor counts, etc. These are all what we often call metrics when we are discussing on our mailing-list or in the projects.
As everyone of us know, who had took part in these discussions, these metrics are no good measurements. The reason from them to be not good is that one can interpret them in a lot of ways. And they do not necessarily correlate with the outcome we wish.
The outcome we want to achieve is higher quality of our articles, more penetration of our projects, more participation of our users, more diversity of our projects, etc. And these are not so easy to measure.
Let's take the example of article quality. I know discussion about article quality since I joined our editing community. How can you design a measurement for so much articles in more than 270 languages in topics as different as top quark and Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva? The most obvious suggestion is article length. But the sole length of an article doesn't really reflect the quality of an article. An article could be very long, but still badly structured, poorly referenced and contains strong point of view. The article depth is a more sophisticated approach which treats a language version as a whole and tries to calculate how often the articles are updated. Beside technical and methodological problems there are also other difficulties in measuring quality. The perception for a good article and a bad article can differ between the editing community, the general public and experts of their fields. Each of these groups can have different criteria for quality of articles. For example the general public may value an article as higher quality because it is more comprehensible, but comprehensible may mean for an expert explanations that contain more ambivalent and misleading analogues.
Because of the difficulty of measurement of outcomes there is often a big gap between the measurable output of an organization and its impact. This problem is annoying for most of nonprofit organizations and highly uncomfortable for their boards. Nevertheless most of the organizations believe that they achieve impact with their work. The HBS researchers call this believe Theory of Change. It is a hypothetical and in many cases unproved theory about if we do this, than we will change the society in that way, and that would lead to the fulfillment of our mission. Most strategies of nonprofit organizations are based on theories of change.
So the theory of change of article length is that longer articles tend to contain more information, tend to be more thorough and thus of higher quality. The theory of change of article depth is that if more updates are done on a language version, then we can assume that the articles are more up-to-date, and more failures are corrected by the editing community, and thus better articles.
But as the many discussions in the past and current suggest these are all hypothetical theories and we don't really know.
The best way to proof the theory of change is to measure the outcome. As I had already written before, this is not easy. In many cases the organization also has no resource in know-how, man power and money to conduct a measurement or survey. The WikiMedia Foundation and our communities had in the past conducted a score of experiments and methods to measure the quality:
The featured article is doubtless the most successful of these. It is a measurement from the view of our editing community for high quality articles. Across all projects the threshold for featured articles are very high. With the public policy project WikiMedia Foundation began in the last months a test on user feed backs about quality from the reader perception. Although there were some outside evaluations with experts like those conducted by Nature or c't, these evaluations are often of too small a scale and not consistent enough to give us an overall trend over the years and across the language versions, or in more general fields.
So one of our major tasks in the coming years is still to find a way to bridge some gaps of theory of change. And one of the tasks of the board would be to engage our community and outside experts to free their resources and expertise to help us in this endeavor.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Vision, Mission, Strategy
In the four days while my stay in the Harvard Business School I often looked back at our vision, mission and strategy. The second day of the course concentrates on how vision and mission decide strategy. As Professor Leonhard put it, the question 0: What is we supposed to do.
Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
And our overall strategy to fulfill that mission is: In coordination with a network of chapters and individual volunteers, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
One of the most appalling think that we experienced in study the cases by HBS is that it shows how easily one lose his mission out of the sight and how difficult it often is to judge if a decision supports the mission. This seems especially easy in time of crisis. And that brings me back again and again to the most difficult discussions at the moment in our movement. The most difficult inside the board, between the board and the community, and inside the community: The controversial content discussion.
We have here two radical position that in my opinion reflects two aspects of our mission:
*The freedom of speech, the not censoring of project content according to whatever criteria as long as we move inside the frame of law reflects the aspect in our mission and vision, that we want to share the sum of ALL educational knowledge. And the sum of all knowledge certainly includes also those that are controversial.
*On the other hand, if part of the knowledge we are providing is so upset for part of the people around the world, so that they feel our projects as insulting and refuses to share their knowledge on our projects or share the knowledge that is collected on our projects, than we certainly failed to fulfill this aspect of our mission.
The call of boycott on the Aceh Wikipedia against the rest of our projects shows in a radical and confusing way how emotional and sometimes irrational this conflict even can evolve inside of our own community.
To me the duty of the board is to find out a way so that all aspects of our mission can be fulfilled, in engaged discussion with the community. Because it is a mission matter, it is a board issue, and because it is a mission matter, it is important. The lessons I learned by studying the cases is, it is all too easy to lost our mission, because of our personal view, because of the emotion that is involved in the discussion, because it relates to value and is a complicated topic. All this is for me even more reason to keep our mission in our mind when we are working through this topic. And again
Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
And our overall strategy to fulfill that mission is: In coordination with a network of chapters and individual volunteers, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.
One of the most appalling think that we experienced in study the cases by HBS is that it shows how easily one lose his mission out of the sight and how difficult it often is to judge if a decision supports the mission. This seems especially easy in time of crisis. And that brings me back again and again to the most difficult discussions at the moment in our movement. The most difficult inside the board, between the board and the community, and inside the community: The controversial content discussion.
We have here two radical position that in my opinion reflects two aspects of our mission:
*The freedom of speech, the not censoring of project content according to whatever criteria as long as we move inside the frame of law reflects the aspect in our mission and vision, that we want to share the sum of ALL educational knowledge. And the sum of all knowledge certainly includes also those that are controversial.
*On the other hand, if part of the knowledge we are providing is so upset for part of the people around the world, so that they feel our projects as insulting and refuses to share their knowledge on our projects or share the knowledge that is collected on our projects, than we certainly failed to fulfill this aspect of our mission.
The call of boycott on the Aceh Wikipedia against the rest of our projects shows in a radical and confusing way how emotional and sometimes irrational this conflict even can evolve inside of our own community.
To me the duty of the board is to find out a way so that all aspects of our mission can be fulfilled, in engaged discussion with the community. Because it is a mission matter, it is a board issue, and because it is a mission matter, it is important. The lessons I learned by studying the cases is, it is all too easy to lost our mission, because of our personal view, because of the emotion that is involved in the discussion, because it relates to value and is a complicated topic. All this is for me even more reason to keep our mission in our mind when we are working through this topic. And again
Our vision is: Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment.
Our mission is: The mission of the WikiMedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
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