How do we develop ideas about long-term changes, prioritize them, and pursue them over time (through obstacles, sets of pro and con contributors, usability studies, &c)?
Discussion of problems and tasks on Wikipedia itself seems like a great idea to me. (though a lot of people do this now on their own blogs, on mailing lists, and elsewhere...) That way the first people to contribute to an idea can facilitate larger open working groups, and not discourage others from jumping in and fixing things.
Examples
editSome examples of long-term issues that have been at times been hard to persistently make progress on:
- Main page redesign; feeds for subsets of it
- File upload process; better notification for file-status-tracking
- Working with newbies : welcoming, not biting, giving them more than the usual time to respond to standard processes
- Working with anons & vandals : getting stats on what works, what encourages more contribs, and makes bad contribs less visible (without hard security)
- Academic outreach : positively engaging, not opposition, giving them a comfortable space to get involved before getting into an edit war
- Getting found outside of search engines (visualizing this and preparing for it... making internal search better than Web searching -- we have transclusion and bidirectional link data!)
- Motivations for contribution
- Sharing presentations, media, cool ideas - on a high-traffic part of the site
- Internal notices : using available screenspace on Wikipedia to banner-promote other parts of WP/WM... broadening the banners project?
- Perennial_proposals
- Making connections between people with good ideas and no tech skills with those who know how to file bugs and monitor software/extensions/bot progress
Namespaces for persistent conversations
editWhat is a model for persistent conversations about key topics, which are not themselves specific proposals but identify areas of importance, priorities, resources, interested parties, potential solutions? How does this build off of Wikipedia:Perennial proposals ? Does this look like policy proposals, RFC discussions with statements & review & background, article growth over time, or something else?
This sort of discussion...
editIs there already a place for this kind of meta-discussion? Perennial proposals itself isn't particularly reflective about the proposal-to-perennial-summary process, for instance.
Open planning fora; lessons from the Special Projects Committee
editMy experience with the now defunct SPC suggests that despite the seemingly good reasons for having small group discussions you actually want public discussions, with good processes for high signal and recognition for consistent contribution rather than barriers to entry. We had a few awesome well-run meetings, but there was no reason for almost any of it that there needed to be barriers to participation, once there was a shared sense of purpose and community around the topics of interest. (there are exceptions when non-public information comes into play, but that is less than 10% of the total; if we can really nail the other 90% the projects will be on a much sounder footing!)
It would be handy to have more talented community mediators for any long-term/long-range discussions. I'd like to see some expansion to the community processes for training and recognizing med-folk... the planning equivalent of neutrality is important if you want to make progress and understand distinct, partly-conflicting sets of priorities.