Talk:Vision, values and mission (proposed)

OKF sources

When did the charity accept the Open Knowledge Foundation's definitions, is this in a past vote of members or is it a change to our Articles? Note, our Articles use the term "open content" not "open knowledge". Personally, I have never reviewed the OKF's definitions, nor been asked to. --Fæ (talk) 15:31, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

The above comment was posted before I had finished putting the pages up. Please see the background information at the Engine Room. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:24, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

The question remains. There are two fundamental problems with relying on the OKF definitions rather than sticking to the definitions that the Wikimedia UK charity was created to fulfil:

1. Rather than a short and simple mission, we now ask prospective members, donors and volunteers to go to the OKF website to learn definitions rather that using plain English to understand what we stand for. The definitions on OKF are not simple and this proposal changes a sub-50 word mission into several pages of complex reading.
2. The OKF definition is not compatible with the current aims of the charity. I believe that for this proposal to be accepted by the board of trustees we would have to change the articles of the charity and go back to the charity commission to change our scope; this means the trustees cannot make this change without proposing this change at an AGM or EGM. In particular the OKF definition of access allows for non-free access, consequently Wikimedia UK could use its charitable monies to fund commercial projects with advertising or with access fees; both of these potential changes are an anathema to the existing values of the charity. Fæ (talk) 09:44, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

WMUK doesn't have a working definition at the moment, the OKF is a good one arising from our (broad) open community. Their definition is on a single page not "several" and is in plain English. It provides a framework for us to work in, while in any case using language ("open") most of us will be familiar with. "Free" doesn't entail "open", but "open" does entail "free", and just as in Wikimedia projects that includes the potential for commercial exploitation (through licenses that do not include the "NC" element). I'm not sure what you think is changing here... Sjgknight (talk) 10:06, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

By "several pages" I mean "screen-fulls". The current Mission/Values fills about half of my 21 inch monitor. The proposed version is 2 screens and the required definitions from OKF are another 3 screens. Going from ½ a screen to 5 screens worth of text is "several pages" using my plain English language interpretation. --Fæ (talk) 13:06, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, looking again at definition used by the Open Knowledge Foundation, it includes the statement "The work shall be available as a whole and at no more than a reasonable reproduction cost". That does indeed seem to make it unsuitable for us to adopt, as we focus on working with content/knowledge that either is not IP protected at all ('public domain') or that is released under a licence that must not include any requirement for payment for re-use (not even 'reasonable reproduction costs'). The point of including a definition section is to simplify, and to allow us to use consistent language throughout (not the case at the moment). If there is no obvious external definition we can just pick up and use, by all means let us write our own. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:16, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

"At no more than" does not preclude "at less than" cost. Moreover, I think the point there is that there clearly are costs involved (such as having an internet connection, printing) but ideally things should be available free on the internet. Sjgknight (talk) 10:25, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

For ease of reading, I have merged this thread with the one below entitled Wikimedia UK's definition of 'free' and 'open'. Please continue the discussion there. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 21:52, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Fundamental change to limit the charity to "education"

This proposal includes a radical change of scope for Wikimedia UK, from:

Wikimedia UK’s mission is to help people and organisations build and preserve open knowledge to share and use freely.

to:

Our vision is educational Open Knowledge for all.

Our mission is to help people and organisations create and preserve educational Open Knowledge, and to help provide easy access for all.

This change is emphasised in the values as "We promote the provision of high quality educational Open Knowledge to all.".

This drops from the charity's mission the preservation of open knowledge outside of "education" and potentially limits all future projects for the charity to those that provide high quality and "educational" open knowledge (as defined by the OKF, rather than the WMF or Wikimedia projects). This is a radical change which could see WMUK refusing to fund Commons upload projects, or Wikimedia content creation projects that were not judged to be of sufficiently "high quality" or of sufficient "educational" value. For example Wiki Loves Monuments is good for public engagement but tends to provide a mass of non-high quality photos, similarly an editathon at a school would be highly likely to mostly generate content for Wikipedia articles of interest to teenagers but would have almost no true "educational" content. --Fæ (talk) 15:31, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

The above comments were posted while I was putting the pages up, and before they were finished. They are not applicable to the corrected draft text. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:19, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

"V2 Accessibility and Quality" is stated as "We promote the provision of high quality educational Open Knowledge to all." The same points above apply with regard to introducing the new constraint to our projects that we will only consider "high quality". --Fæ (talk) 09:55, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Read through to the first 'goals', specifically to increase and improve content. We track both, but we absolutely should have an interest in high quality content over just any content. That is not to say that mass upload projects would not be funded, but their success would not just be about the number of files uploaded (although that would be part of it). Note that on technical projects, potentially including mass upload, the fourth set of outcomes would also be of interest. Sjgknight (talk) 10:06, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Yes, goals G1.1 and 1.2 are deliberately separate so that we have one Outcome for quality and another for quantity. Both are important, and we would like to attempt to track and publish details of our impact for these two goals separately. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 14:09, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Wikimedia UK's definition of 'free' and 'open'

The current Mission of the charity includes "use freely" and "free and open licences". This proposal removes the concept of "free" entirely. This is a significant difference between free access and open access or free software and open software; namely this leaves the charity in a position to promote licences and software for which there is no free re-use, nor any free access. Why would the members of the charity want this change? --Fæ (talk) 15:44, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Open knowledge entails freedoms in that sense. It's a useful clarification but could you avoid the pointy headings please Sjgknight (talk) 16:50, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

The concepts of 'free' and 'open' are integral to the Open Definition of Free Knowledge/Free Content as used by the Open Knowledge Foundation, and hence no longer need to be stated repeatedly (in varying ways) throughout the strategy. If you mean something different by 'free', could you define your meaning please? --MichaelMaggs (talk) 17:29, 1 February 2014 (UTC)

Open is not the same as free. By deleting free from our mission/values you are fundamentally changing the charity. See #OKF sources above. --Fæ (talk) 09:48, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

See above Sjgknight (talk) 10:06, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I find the "Open Definition" page opaque and uninspiring: it's not the grammar or the words, but I don't get a sense of it clearly defining a distinctive thing or area of culture. The only mention of "free" is in the unfortunately ambiguous "freely available". I personally point people to the Free Cultural Works definition. At least one of the people behind it is a prominent Wikipedian. Free Cultural Works is a label used a lot by Creative Commons and is explicitly intended as a synonym for "free content". I also find Fae's tabloidy headline approach to be counter-productive and uncivil. MartinPoulter (talk) 16:21, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Sub-title changed rather than turn this thread into a long list of what a terrible, awful, ghastly person I am. --Fæ (talk) 17:30, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

One easy or at least legally-certain approach would be to use the definitions we already have within our articles of association, namely:

M3. The Objects of the Charity are, for the benefit of the public, to promote and support the widest possible public access to, use of and contribution to Open Content of an encyclopaedic or educational nature or of similar utility to the general public, in particular the Open Content supported and provided by Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., based in San Francisco, California, USA.

"Content" means textual or numerical information, still or moving images, sound or music or other data disseminated on printed, electronic and other appropriate media and services. Content is subject to editorial policies and safeguards designed to ensure its overall accuracy and quality.

Content is "Open" when it is available for no charge and without discrimination to the general public, with legal rights to view, copy, share, adapt, improve and otherwise use and reuse that content and when technical measures are in place to support such usage.

If we did that, we would just replace 'Open Knowledge' with 'Open Content' wherever the former appears. We would not in addition add the word 'free' since the requirement of being "available for no charge" is built into the definition of 'Open'. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 18:26, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Looks fine. We need to make such things far more integrated across the wiki through effective use of internal-links, etc. Sjgknight (talk) 18:31, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

When the mission, vision and values were defined in 2011, there was a bit of conversation among the Board of the time about how to use the words "free" and "open". My view at the time was that we shouldn't worry too much about the semantics of this point, and we'd know whether something was "free" and "open" if we saw it. To date that has worked, but I support the idea of offering (or more accurately, linking to!) a closer definition of "open" as part of this statement, in case there is ambiguity at some future point. If someone wants the pithy one-sentence statement we can tell them our mission, if they want the exhaustive detail they can follow the links.

The OKF definition seems a sensible one to me, though I have not looked in detail at others. I'd be particularly interested if anyone can identify any reason why this proposed definition (or anything else in the proposed new mission, vision or values) would change what we are doing or are likely to do in practice.

Also, in passing, the existing mission, vision and values were defined at a Board workshop in summer 2011, and I think now is a good time to iterate them :-) The Land (talk) 18:19, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

if you insist on free rather than open, you will be limiting the quality of your knowledge diffusion. see also the MP4 debate. already we're seeing the open community moving out, and leaving wikipedia behind in its walled garden. open is free as in speech and free as in beer, but not free as in loader. 98.163.68.34 19:11, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Personally, I would much prefer to see us to use the definition in the Objects rather than that provided by OKF, as suggested by Michael above. I'm not sure that the Wikimedia movement as a whole has ever held a discussion about whether Wikimedia fits in with, or agrees with the OKF definitions - that would make an interesting RfC (if I haven't missed one about it already). Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:07, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

Values vs actions

The way that the values are written here makes them sound like actions rather than values. "We promote", "We encourage", "We support" are all things that the organisation does, not what it values. The only exception is 'We are committed to'. It's a semantic issue, but it would be good to see these clearly set out as values that the organisation holds. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:13, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

VVM of other chapters?

The see also section only links to the WMF's VVM. Have the trustees looked into the values, vision and mission of the other Wikimedia chapters (where they have them)? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 21:20, 24 February 2014 (UTC)

I've spent a bit of time looking around for other strategy documents, and of course we put the request for comment out fairly widely, but it's very time consuming and not necessarily terribly productive given it involves a lot of translation (even to just do the search). If you have particular chapters, or resources in mind then do let us know though. Sjgknight (talk) 13:50, 25 February 2014 (UTC)