Wikidata talk:Strategy 2017/Cycle 2/Healthy, Inclusive Communities

What impact would we have on the world if we follow this theme?

Slowking4

increase in diversity of data; increase in quality of the data. more fun. Slowking4 (talk)

@Slowking4: I agree in a way (community is the basis), but could you describe more specifically, why/how health influences the diversity and quality? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 12:39, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

health is am analogy for a functional community that gets work done. more diverse teams are more productive, and produce quality work. we need to do the touchy-feely work to build healthy teams. the teams are the ones who deliver the strategic goals. goals without a healthy community is empty rhetoric. we have some failed wikis as a warning, as to what a dead community looks like. Slowking4 (talk) 08:51, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

How important is this theme relative to the other 4 themes? Why?

Mep77

People at Wikimedia make its value, in my opinion this is the most relevant statement as only a healthy community will commit and progress. Being inclusive and striving to engage people from different backgrounds and geographies will help Wikimedia being a neutral source of knowledge.  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Mep77 (talk • contribs).

Slowking4

most important. healthy community - culture eats strategy for breakfast. poor health will impact ability to deliver on other goals. Slowking4 (talk)

ArthurPSmith

I agree that without a healthy community nothing else here will be possible. This element is vital, and should be given the highest priority. Large is good but healthy doesn't necessarily mean large - rather having the right balance of good administrators, experienced editors, new editors (and minimizing vandals), and ensuring overall community size and diversity is commensurate with the scope of the work. ArthurPSmith (talk) 19:33, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Lymantria

A healthy community is vital and, apart from being seen as important data source, I think this is the second most important part of strategy. Lymantria (talk) 15:42, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

Focus requires tradeoffs. If we increase our effort in this area in the next 15 years, is there anything we’re doing today that we would need to stop doing?

ChristianKl

Being inclusive means that we will integrate information into Wikidata that some people care about while other people don't care about and want to use notability rules to be more exclusive. Currently, many new editors who come to Enwiki are faced with the prospect of their articles getting deleted for notability issues. All the talk about wanting to be inclusive changes little about the actual practice of being exclusive by rejecting articles.

For Wikidata I think we succeed in being very inclusive but I'm not sure what can be realistically done to change the notability guidelines Wikipedia to be more inclusive and allow articles about a broader spectrum. ChristianKl (talk) 09:57, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Slowking4

stop trying to import policy and cultural norms from other projects. the community and issues are different. develop welcoming teams rather than the usual adversive warnings. stop trying to reinvent metadata ontologies, rather incorporate existing schemas. Slowking4 (talk)

Lymantria

I think there are two points of danger: notability and project guidelines.

Notability often has some subjective elements in it. Many wiki's know of debates about notability - and often new users are discouraged to feel free to add new articles/items because that leads to deletion of their input. Also it can lead to unhealthy situations of different user groups, with different backgrounds and different interests. That does not help to find new users. Especially not if an article is deleted on one project for notability reasons, but on another project a similar page is accepted. On the other hand, advertisers are aware of this weak spot of wikipedia's and try to promote their businesses and stress their notability.

Guidelines can be different among projects. My impression is that there are guidelines that may not be understood by all users evenly well. And perhaps the number of guidelines sometimes is growing too high. Users may feel some bureaucracy, which I think is not helpful. Lymantria (talk) 15:58, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

What else is important to add to this theme to make it stronger?

Slowking4

implementation plan and resource loading of the themes. Slowking4 (talk)

@Slowking4: each possible theme may require implementation. The question is, what to add to the understanding of this theme. What to add to the description. Could you elaborate? SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 12:39, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

code of conduct, standards of practice, leadership, training in human resource management. Slowking4 (talk)