Category Archives: Wikipedia

Communications at Wikimedia

Wikimedia logo family complete 2

I am happy to announce that I have joined the Wikimedia Foundation’s Communications team as Movement Communications Manager.

I have really enjoyed my work as product manager at Wikimedia in the last three years, leading the development of new tools like Notifications, Thanks, Beta Features, Media Viewer and other multimedia products. I am grateful for this opportunity to improve so many different parts of the Wikipedia user experience.

One of the lessons I learned during that time is that ‘better communications’ are really important to make the Wikimedia movement more effective. I also think that growing a ‘culture of kindness‘ is key if we want to engage a broader community of contributors. I hope to support both of these goals in my new role. 

I am now working with the WMF communications team on the Wikimedia blog and movement communications. My focus for the blog includes improving contributor workflow for community members and foundation staff, and providing editorial guidance for contributors. I also act as the main contact point for authors submitting new blog posts, and shepherd the publication process. Within movement communications, I work to improve the availability, distribution, and timeliness of communications from the foundation to the broader community.

I’d like to thank all my colleagues on the multimedia and product teams — as well as our many community champions — for being such wonderful collaborators over the past few years. I am proud of what we accomplished together, and I hope that the features we created can help many more people share knowledge productively in years to come. 

I’m delighted to take on this new assignment, and I look forward to many more productive collaborations in the coming year.

Onward!

A Culture of Kindness

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Many community members think that ‘being nice to each other’ can help improve Wikipedia.

Can we improve Wikipedia by being nicer to each other?

This was the topic of my talk at Wikimania 2014, which you can watch in the video below. In this short post, I would like to share some ideas from community members for growing a “culture of kindness” on Wikipedia.

Over the past few years, I have asked hundreds of Wikipedians the same question: ‘How can we improve Wikipedia?’. I invite them to write down their idea on a notepad, and then I take their photo, which I then share with other community members, as shown here.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales invites community members to 'be kind to each other' at Wikimania 2014 in London.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales invites Wikipedians to ‘be kind to each other’.

Here are some of the most frequent responses I have collected: “Be nice,” “Help the newbies,” “Be friendly.” Participants often observe that participating on Wikipedia can be a frustrating experience for new and experienced users alike, because many of our members lack civility. That hostile behavior turns away many good people, who might otherwise contribute to our cause — and this seems to harm the free knowledge movement.

‘A Culture of Kindness’ Slides

With that in mind, here are some of the ideas I have collected for building more trust in our communities:

  • help newbies
  • train editors
  • reward kindness
  • build more social tools
  • use friendlier channels
  • give everyone a voice

Help newbies

Be more encouraging to new users. Improve the way we welcome new contributors. Let them know they can help. Show them easy, fun things to do. This can be done through community programs like the Teahouse, as well as through personalized tasks and to-do lists.

Train editors

Invite current editors to be more effective in their interactions with other users, through online training events and mentoring programs. This is easier said than done, as many editors don’t feel like they need to be trained or don’t have the time for this. But everyone can benefit from a bit of coaching when it comes to empathy. And special rewards could be offered to editors who take this practice seriously.

Reward kindness

Identify people who treat others nicely, show them appreciation, celebrate their acts of kindness, honor them as role models, encourage them to show others how to do the same. Kindness can be contagious!

Build more social tools

Simple features can help encourage kindness in subtle but powerful ways, like the popular Thanks notification feature that my team developed for Wikipedia. Other software tools could help invite more civil interactions, such as a better discussion system, real user profiles, or user avatars.

Another way to build more trust is to invite anonymous users to use a persistent identity, with some form of authentication that is more reliable than IP addresses. This idea is still controversial in our movement, but worth considering if we seriously want to improve current community relations.

Use friendlier channels

Communicate over more user-friendly channels: from face-to-face meetings to video conferences — or other ways to humanize how we interact with each other — to complement text-only channels that don’t convey emotions or body language very well. Our video roundtables are a good example of how civil conversations can be encouraged on multimedia channels.

Give everyone a voice

Make it easier for diverse user groups to contribute to our movement. For example, our nearly 500 million readers can help with simple feedback on how to improve Wikipedia content, as our largest user group. Women should also be empowered to participate more actively on our sites: to this day, a vast majority of Wikipedia editors are still men, and more kindness could help close that gender gap. And the same goes with many ethnic minorities and other disenfranchised groups. Giving all these users a voice can help make them feel part of our movement, and eventually engage them as future contributors.

Watch the video

To hear more about these ideas, you can watch this video of my half-hour presentation at Wikimania 2014, which provides more insights collected from community members:

Fabrice Florin presents ideas for improving how we interact with each other on Wikipedia, speaking at Wikimania in London on August 10, 2014.

This video is also available in other formats on Vimeo and YouTube. Key points of that presentation are featured in these slides.

I take these issues seriously, as they can slow down our collective work and prevent us from growing as a movement. The hostile behavior many users have experienced on our sites harms us all; I hope that over time, we can all make Wikipedia a safer place, so that more people can feel comfortable sharing knowledge in our projects. To that end, I am now studying the impact of kindness in collaborative environments — and I would be grateful for any recommendations you might have, as well as links to research studies, tools or best practices on that topic.

Some of the ideas above are easier to implement than others, some of them are more controversial. But I believe most of them could make a difference towards encouraging a kinder, more civil behavior within our movement.

Onward!

This personal blog post was re-published here on the Wikimedia blog on December 24, 2014. Fabrice’s talk on ‘A Culture of Kindness’ was first presented at Wikimania Social Machines Weekend, held by video conference on May 24, 2014. It was then shared with a larger group at Wikimania 2014 in London, on August 10, 2014. See also: Wikimania audience comments and video conference chat log.

Try out Media Viewer

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We invite you to try Media Viewer, a new tool for browsing multimedia content, which is now in beta on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites.

Today, viewing images on our sites can be a frustrating experience for casual users: when you click on a thumbnail in an article, you are taken to a separate page where the image is shown in medium size and surrounded with a lot of text information that can be confusing.

Media Viewer aims to improve this viewing experience by showing images in larger size, overlaid on your current page. To reduce visual clutter, all information is shown below the image, and can be expanded at a click of a button.

To see how it works, check out this video demo:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DL02Ry7u-w&t=11m15s; w=640&h=480&rel=0]

Fabrice Florin and Mark Traceur present ‘Media Viewer’ at the Wikimedia Foundation

This new tool is being developed by the Wikimedia Foundation’s multimedia team and we now invite you to try out in beta version. We plan to gradually release this tool in coming months, starting with first pilot tests in April, followed by wider deployments in May.

You can check out Media Viewer on this test page. Click on any thumbnail image to enlarge it. (If you haven’t already,  be sure to sign up or log in, then click on the small ‘Beta’ link in your personal menu to enable ‘Media Viewer’. For more info, read these testing tips.)

Once you’ve tried Media Viewer, please let us know what you think here in the comments, or on this discussion page.

We’re very grateful to all the community members who helped create this feature, through a series of roundtable discussions held in person, on Google Hangouts, as well as on IRC. If you would like to participate in future discussions, we invite you to join our multimedia mailing list.

To learn more, visit our Media Viewer page. Also check out this Multimedia Vision for 2016, to see how this all fits in together with other features in development. We’re building a whole new multimedia layer to help people learn through images, sounds and videos, not just text.

I look forward to more collaborations in coming months. It’s an honor to help improve Wikipedia with our community — and to create a better experience together!

Enjoy …

A Multimedia Vision for Wikipedia

How will we use multimedia on our sites in three years?

Our Wikimedia Foundation’s Multimedia team was formed to provide a richer experience and support more media contributions on Wikipedia, Commons, and MediaWiki sites. We believe that audio-visual media offer a unique opportunity to engage a wide range of users to participate productively in our collective work.

To inform our plans, we’ve created a simple vision of how we might collaborate through multimedia by 2016.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2RKZnrOXmw&w=640&h=480&rel=0]

This hypothetical scenario was prepared with guidance from community members and is intended for discussion purposes, to help us visualize possible improvements to our user experience over the next three years.

This presentation is intended for discussion purposes, to get community feedback on goals we are considering. To that end, we would love to hear what you think of this vision. Please join our discussion − or add your comments below − and help guide our development plans.

Read more on the Wikimedia blog.

Introducing Beta Features

Screenshot of the new Beta Features preferences page. Media Viewer is one of the first Beta Features we're testing on Wikipedia.

Screenshot of the new Beta Features preferences page. Media Viewer is one of the first Beta Features we’re testing on Wikipedia.

I’m happy to announce the launch of Beta Features, a new program that lets you test new features on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites before they are released for everyone.

The Beta Features program lets developers roll out new software in an environment where lots of users can use these features, then give feedback to help make them better.

Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming changes and help designers and engineers make improvements based on their suggestions.

I am product manager for this first version of Beta Features, working with my colleagues James ForresterMark HolmquistJared Zimmerman and many other Wikimedia Foundation team members to bring it to our community.

Learn more on this project hub.