@Wikipedia is old news, it could point to new sources

Wikipedia provides the best text on many subjects. It being static is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when it is a topic that is very much in the public eye, it attracts many people willing to edit and come to a neutral point of view.

It is a curse when the topic is no longer popular. No longer is there an interest to maintain the information, new publications are not integrated in what used to be a neutral point of view.

In the references section of an article you find the underpinnings of what is stated in an article. It may be newspaper articles or science papers. Both newspapers and science have a hard time attracting attention and this endangers the availability of quality sources for future updates.

In Scholia information is continuously updated about the latest papers by authors and or about subjects. As time goes by, papers become available dated later than the latest reference. When such papers are clearly marked, it is an invitation for the Wikipedia community to revisit a subject and learn if what was a neutral point of view survives as such vis a vis the latest information.

Every subject should have its own Scholia.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikidata - in #defence of Erika Herzog

On Facebook, Erika made a few comments that were not well received. A few really positive things did come out as a result but there is a need to defend Erika and her central argument. She asked if there had been a process of consulting the English Wikipedia community because the user interface of Wikidata is so poor. She said:

"... But I am pretty sure a lot of En Wikipedia editors are going to be sort of upset about this shift that requires them to actually edit Wikidata without a form input method (on WikiMarkup). Is there a form input on Visual Editor for this?"

On Facebook she is attacked for all the wrong reasons. A Wikimedia functionary asks: "How is this a Wikidata matter? English Wikipedia is where you want to discuss this." Erika's answer is spot on: "Actually no it's not. I'm tired of this response. It's not helpful or realistic. This is a Wikidata item in terms of buy-in and outreach to incorporate more Wikipedia editors. It's disingenuous to posit otherwise. This needs to be a discussion on both sides, and I think the onus is more on the Wikidata side as the usability and UX is poor at best."

One positive outcome of the Facebook thread is that it is mentioned that there is a method under development to edit Wikidata from Wikipedia templates. However welcome, it is going to introduce its own problems because the primacy of the data remains at Wikidata. The user interface of Wikidata is indeed awful. As one of the more prolific Wikidata editors I only use it for editing. For displaying the data I use Reasonator exclusively. Compare this with this for instance and you will see why.

The reason for this are applicable priorities. The WMF has too many concurrent ambitions for Wikidata and the staff is overextended. When the question is if Wikidata is sufficiently user friendly for an average Wikipedian, the answer is no. At this time Wikidata cannot cope with all the changed committed to it as it is, the wise words of Johan Cruyff apply; every disadvantage has its advantage.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia - #notadog and #notmemberofthepack

It is controversial when you tell the #Wikipedia crowd that they do not look after their own. I am not a Wikipedian, I do not want to be as my experiences are not that positive. It is not that I do not care deeply about free content and the opportunities the Wikimedia Foundation offers.

My point is simple; as a community we seem to be only interested in the production and maintenance of content and not really in the quality of the reader experience / the consumption of all the good stuff that exists. I will support it with a number of examples.

Wikimania is the annual Wikimedia conference and it boasts many high grade presentations important for the understanding of the past and the history of what we do. For this reason it makes sense to do a thorough job and include all the presentations in Wikidata so that we provide the same opportunity to explore this content as we do for TED conferences and presentations. When we do, we will honour the many Wikimedians who presented in the past. This may prove controversial because of the many conflicting notions of notability.

Wikisource is "Wikimedia project, an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki". For readers there is one vital problem. Much of it are works in progress, some need a finishing touch others still need a lot of tender loving care. With a different approach to finished goods and, it is easy enough to know the status of sources, a clean user interface can be delivered to potential readers expanding the reach of the work that is done.

Commons is an "online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files, part of the Wikimedia Foundation". As a repository it functions really well. Large numbers of media files are deposited and used within the Wikimedia projects but my experience is that when you seek an image, it is really hard. The category system is hard to navigate, there are no labels attached to images that help finding relevant content and it is English only. Finding something among 32,289,013 files is really hard. For now I have given up on Commons.

Being critical of Wikipedia is frowned upon. A typical response is "so fix it" but when solutions are offered that improve its quality, typically a suggestion falls on deaf ears. It is easy enough to improve the functionality of red links, but this idea is probably to mundane to consider even though it has been proven to be easy to implement.

People fault me for being blunt. To some extend it is part of the culture I grew up in; to some extend it is because I have lost faith in the "community". My experience is that there is too much group think and I am definitely not a member of the pack, I prefer to make up my own mind, I articulate my opinions and arguments and care not too much when people react negatively without considering the arguments.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikidata supports over 300 languages - implications

Wikidata is a single project that supports over 300 languages. The aim is that all data is usable in any and all of them. One important consequence is that for each item 300 translations of the label are needed.

Obviously less items is more. Each item has to have a purpose that is clear, obvious and cannot be expressed in another way.

For this reason I am opposed to the addition of all kinds of subclasses that add no value. There is no point to "APA Award". It is an award that is conferred by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and it can be easily described in two statements.

It makes it extra hard to add translations. It is relevant to know that it is an award. It is important to know who conferred it but there is no point having this expressed in a combined item.  There is no point, it does not fit with the work that is done on awards. It makes Wikidata less usable and consequently such items need to be deleted.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikidata has a CC-0 license. This should not change.

The Wikipedia Signpost is a publication of the English Wikipedia. It published a piece about copyright and Wikidata and it suggested that a more restrictive license would be fine. Their problem: others benefit and do not need to acknowledge Wikidata as a source.

For me the most important thing of our work is that it is used. Everything we can do to make our data used more increases the value of our data, This is best achieved by refusing to put any restrictions on our data.

One argument for another license is that "it recognises the labour that goes into maintaining the data". The question is how to recognise this and why.  Every data point has its own history both for the property and for the data and as a consequence it is the database that you refer to for the attribution. For human consumption it is the label that gives Wikidata much of its relevance; giving tribute to the people who add labels is as relevant.

Data is mostly generated in an automated or semi-automated way. I would not have over 2 million edits if all statements I added had to be done by hand. With StrepHit, a tool that retrieves facts from authorised sources, data gathering will become even more sophisticated, reliable and complete. The link to personal glory in attribution becomes very much absent.

Wikidata will become increasingly rich in references and tools like StrepHit will ensure the quality of such references. Wikidata is already very rich in references to other sources of data and it is why Wikidata will evolve into a resource for comparison with the data in these sources. These other sources may opt to adopt or report and the same is our option. Comparisons allow us to research the issues that exist with the data we hold and these comparisons will become highly automated and intelligent.

My point is very much that Wikidata is not a glory project. Our data is incomplete and immature and in several ways more ambitious than what a Wikipedia aims to do. Wikidata can include the ambitions of a Wikipedia up to a point. To realise its own ambitions, becoming a valuable and valued resource in the web of data set, it is important to be as open and available as we can be. A license that does not restrict is one of the underpinnings. Moving towards a more restricted license will only create a morass of uncertainty and doubt. It will bring us no benefit.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia - its tyranny of sources

Let us keep it simple; a credible source is a source that that provides good information. There are several aspects to it.

• accurate
• unbiased
• timely
• complete

A lot of research went into "proving" that Wikipedia is a credible source. Typically this was done by subject matter experts that examined a subset of articles. Usually a lot of "sources" coincided with credibility. 

The point was made repeatedly, Wikipedia is credible for its intended use.

Proving that Wikidata provides good information is different. It is incomplete; a lot of information is just not there. Twenty percent of its items provide no information. When sources are cited, it is Wikipedia that is referred to. Data like deaths in 2015 is no longer maintained. The pope, the bishop of Rome, has no longer the "Roman Catholic Church" as his faith.

Wikidata is immature and that is ok.

The approach to sources for Wikidata is tyrannical. It imposes sources for each statement and the suggestion is that this will make it credible. When you consider the sheer number of statements and the speed at which they increase it is impossible to see how that will work. It is well understood that having a source for a "fact" is one way to perpetuate a lie.

There is a better approach to proving Wikidata as a credible source. This is done in the same way as it was suggested that Wikipedia was credible; by comparing it to others like Brockhaus and Encyclopaedia Britannica. Much of the ground work is already there. We can compare to VIAF, to the GND. The point of this would not be that all our data is the same but that we care about quality and share the differences and research those. 

While we make our data as accurate as we can, we can continue to work on making our data complete. Any credible source including Wikipedia and by inference DBpedia qualifies. They qualify because they help us complete our data and do this in a timely way.

This process of adding data is iterative. We add, we check and research the differences. 

Every argument why we cannot do this or should wait denies Wikidata its credibility and worse the call to wait till the latest and greatest gadget comes online demotivates. The Wikipedia approach to sources is great for Wikipedia it just does not work for Wikidata.

Thanks,

      GerardM

#Wikipedia Zero - I am all for it

A wonderful piece about Wikipedia Zero was written by Mike Godwin. It is well worth it, it is relevant and it provides great arguments why Wikipedia Zero is so important.

Please read.

Thanks,
      GerardM

#Reasonator - A new metric for #Wikimedia

Denny wrote a really good article in the SignPost. It includes a "TL:DR" that I am happy to quote.

TL;DR: We should focus on measuring how much knowledge we allow every human to share in, instead of number of articles or active editors. A project to measure Wikimedia's success has been started. We can already start using this metric to evaluate new proposals with a common measure.

The point Denny makes is great; we aim to enable every human being to share in the sum of all knowledge and we should measure the extend to which we are achieving this goal. When you read the article carefully it does not say Wikipedia, it says Wikimetrics. The point Denny makes is very much that we need to focus on what it takes to bring information to people.

Presenting data that is available to us as information is what Reasonator does. It relies on what is known in Wikidata about articles that exist in any Wikipedia. To make this understood to a person, the number of available statements and the number of available labels for an item are key.

When Wikimetrics is to appreciate the potential of Wikidata and the approach Reasonator takes, it should include three bits of information;

• the number of statements per item
• the number of labels per language
• how items are covered with labels in a language

With such an approach the graph will be substantially different. Not one language covers 50% of all the topics known to Wikidata and consequently the graph will show that there is much more work for us to do. It will also indicate that the amount of information that is available for a public that can read English is much larger and the amount available to people who can only read Gujarati is much less.

Thanks,

       GerardM

#Wikipedia - To bot or not to bot

The controversy of bot created articles in Wikipedia is old. The arguments have been similar for a long time. The most famous bot is Rambot; it created stubs for all the places in the United States. This time the "controversy" is about Lsjbot. It created articles on "species" in several Wikipedias. A species is a recognised animal or plant or insect in its nomenclature.

The Wall Street Journal has taken an interest and, Achim Raschka was asked for an opinion and this can be found on his blog. Achim suggests that as a compromise information may be added to Wikidata in this way we can "provide the data to the authors for example when they start an article to choose if they want to use it".

Wikidata has its own problems with bot generated articles. Articles about species are possibly among the most problematic. The biggest problem is that typically Wikidata knows about at least of some items of a list. When this is not considered by the bot operator, it may result in a lot of not very interesting work merging items and deleting duplicates. In addition to this the conventions in Wikidata for "taxons" is quite different. Taxonomy is not static and consequently the hierarchy in Wikidata is inferred and not explicit. This is a major innovation that hides some of the problems of the taxonomy that is in use.

It is quite clear in the opinion of Achim that Wikidata should only be an aid to those people who write Wikipedia articles. The suggestion is made that Wikidata could serve as a source of information for instance for the Red and white giant flying squirrel, a subject he wrote about. Reasonator includes access to the "Concept cloud" tool, it shows all the articles referred to in any of the Wikipedia articles about the Petaurista alborufus.

Achim's opinion is truly Wikipedia centric. Wikipedia articles written by humans is his holy grail. The objective of the Wikimedia foundation however is "to share in the sum of all knowledge".  We have information about subjects like this giant flying squirrel available and, we can share it to the users of the 265 Wikipedias who do not have an article yet.

We can share in the sum of all available knowledge and we should as long as it is our aim to share our knowledge with everyone and not only with potential Wikipedia article writers.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikidata handwaving II

Being an academic can be a blessing and a curse. What it implies is learning. This means that an academic has mastered "much of the understanding of certain subjects. One of the biggest challenges of someone who has understanding on an academic level is, being understood by "other" people. To achieve this, a clear understanding combined with simple sentences and words is needed.

This type of language is knows as "Jip en Janneketaal" in the Netherlands. Expressing yourself in this way is as hard as expressing yourself in a foreign language.

The next challenge for an academic as expressed in Wiktionary, is "having no practical importance". The combination of unintelligible language and no practical relevance is an absolute killer in any conversation. This is when helpful people are so important; they point to the W3C when the Wikipedia article about OWL ass-umes too much.

The argument about upper ontologies and classes is for me academic. I understand the notions expressed in the W3C document but they are not implemented as a system in Wikidata. I understand the idea behind the database reports with "constraint violations" but there are no constraints in place and not much is done as a result of the reports.

The "Wikidata generic tree" shows how much effort has gone in building something that resembles an ontology. It has 17,612 entries! There are reports with constraints that people think are important. All this work needs to be championed.

Tools like Reasonator work better when an item is recognised as a human, male or female. There should be tools that help an editor add relevant information. The use of such tools should be obvious, it should be default and most importantly they should be up to date. When they are, everybody will use them. As a result we will get more data and we could have something like an ontology as well.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Even more heady stuff about #Wikidata and ontologies

In an interview you ask questions and the answers are not yours. When you are as lucky as I have been, you get food for thought but not necessarily answers that close an argument. Given that it is my blog and I am commenting on Wikidata anyway, I decided to add some of my own thoughts as well.

Ontologies in their structure are representations of the world. Wikidata is used by over 280 languages and these represent many more cultures. When one upper ontology finds adoption in Wikidata it will not fit well with many of them. A good example is the conversion following the "main type (GND)" "person" controversy; it has been decided that this will become "instance of" "human" in stead. This means that every person will be identified as a specimen of the species Homo sapiens. This may be technically correct but I am sure that many people will feel alienated as a result.

For me it is very important to keep in mind what Wikidata is there for. It is first and foremost a repository of information that is to be used. The considerations of other data repositories are very much secondary to that. One key objective is to use the information as used in info-boxes. The box used for Ronald Reagan serves well to illustrate a few points. It is indicated that he was both a governor of California and a president of the United States. For both these offices, a start and stop date and a predecessor and successor are indicated. In a classic semantic annotation, each of these dates and other office holders would be on their own. As a consequence it would not be possible to tell what date applies to what and who preceded or succeeded to what office. This information can only be given in a relation and qualifiers are the tool that is available.

In all this "rigidity" is important. Ronald was an actor before he was a governor or a president. This rigidity is however dependent on the community of Wikidata; it is and remains a wiki. The logic associated with an actor or a politician should apply both to Arnold and Ronald in equal measure.

When it is indicated that somebody is a "human", it is obvious that he is born, may die and has a sex. These are obvious inferences and they can be suggested as easy and obvious qualifiers and give them a preferred order of presence. As they are easy and obvious, it should be possible to map information consistently to other resources like DBpedia.

Given that explicit links exist between Wikidata and an increasing number of external resources, it seems obvious that people will find a way to compare data. The big advantage for Wikidata is that it has an explicit purpose that will ensure that its data is going to be used. It is going to be used by the biggest possible public because the aim is to share the sum of all knowledge.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Endowment and #Wikimedia

Every so often, there is talk about an endowment fund for the Wikimedia Foundation. This means that a huge pile of money is kept is reserve for a rainy day.

There are a few problems as far as I am concerned. It makes sense when there is a reasonable fear that we will not be able to fund the projects of the WMF in the future. It assumes all the things the WMF could fund are being funded and are competently managed. The return on investment of putting money in an investment fund .. eh .. endowment fund are better than the return on investment of putting this money to work. People who administer investment funds are bankers.

Given the success of the fundraisers of the WMF, the question if the WMF cannot raise enough funds for its current activities is a joke.

What the WMF currently does and what it could do are two different things. Answering the second can only be answered by looking at what the WMF is there for. I refer to the mission statement on Meta.

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.
In collaboration with a network of chapters, 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.

When I look at this text, the last two words can be seen a reason for an endowment.

However, I am certain that we can do more to "empower and engage people around the world". Just consider how much we do in the United States and compare it to Africa, Asia and South America combined. The WMF works in collaboration with a network of chapters.. Most countries do not have a chapter or another organisation .. yet.

Given that realistically the WMF is only investing in Wikipedia, it can not be said that we are doing everything possible to realise the mission statement. It can be argued that we do everything we can manage at this time.

There is enough room for growth and much of it does not need to cost us anything but time and effort. What is needed is the coordination, the planning and the will to go where Wikimedians have not gone before.
Thanks,
      GerardM

PS for an endowment to work well you have to trust and pay a banker. Personally I have more trust in us spending money wisely.

#Wikipedia traffic includes #mobile

Once upon a time, there was the encyclopaedia that could. It lived on the Internet and people approached it from their laptop or computer. Statistics showed how it grew in the different languages. At a later date there was this application in Ruby on Rails that provided a better experience for people reading Wikipedia on mobile phones. It was significantly different and it showed great potential. The statistics for mobiles were available separately. There was even a statistics page combining the two.

Nowadays, the Wikipedia experience on mobile phones has improved a lot. As a result the mobile traffic in January 2012 is 14.7% of total traffic and, the traffic from mobile phones is responsible for most of the growth in traffic for Wikipedia.

It is quite reasonable to show the all inclusive statistics from the Wikipedia statistics page. Obviously the breakdown in traffic from mobile and non-mobile is relevant. They are important for the people who care for these numbers. The Wikipedia traffic does include traffic from mobile and the combined statistics show most clearly that the appetite for quality information is still growing after all these years.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimania question: "Jimmy what would you do with a million dollar"

The oral history of Wikimania has it that during a traditional board Q&A, I asked Jimmy Wales what we would do with one million dollars. Jimmy referred to this in his latest "state of the Wiki", the closing presentation of all Wikimanias.

In those days, the scrutiny of the community was no less; for many people Wikipedia only needed money for hosting, all other things were considered distractions from our "mission".

The Wikimedia Foundation has grown up considerably, its budget runs now in the multiple millions, its staff has grown to run programs that absorb the money that is put to good use. There is a steady flow of reports. The Wikimedia Foundation is doing well.

It is different with some of our chapters. Chapters are very much integral of our movement, they often gain considerable amounts of money during the annual fund raiser and it is often not known what they do, if they spend it and, how they spend it.

I urged several chapter people at Wikimania to let their stories be heard. Many of them are truly inspirational, a lot of good work is done but unknown to our wider community. As you approach them with good faith, even when you accept their good intentions, the sheer amount of money involved makes it hard if not impossible to accept the radio silence from many chapters. Spending money well is an art in itself, it is already hard when you are flush with cash and you have to consider even more money from future fund raisers...

There is a big dust up between chapter people and the board of the WMF. The board now insists on the transparency that has always been a must in the fund raising agreement. No longer is it a matter only of "thou shall be transparent", there are now sanctions on the horizon as well.

So, dear chapters get your stories out, become transparent, plan ahead, spend your money wisely, be happy to share your wealth when it achieves our goals. One more piece of advice and one question.

• all chapters could do with one PR man getting the chapter stories out
• the language committee knows how to spend some of your money... developing fonts for instance. Even the Latin script will benefit.

Thanks,
      GerardM

#WMFboard; The English language #Wikipedia

As the biggest Wikipedia, the wiki that attracts the most visitors by far for the Wikimedia Foundation, it is the Wiki where all subjects for all cultures need to find their place. When politicians want to make an enemy out of a different people one of the reasons why they may succeed is when there is a lack of credible and available information about the country and the culture of these people.

The Neutral Point of View is a cornerstone for our ability to integrate many different view points. To realise this our ability to welcome people from all over the world is essential. Biting the newbies, is not only a drama for English speakers new to Wikipedia but it is even worse for people for whom the English language and culture is foreign.

Blaming the "dogs" is not fair; they do what they are trained to do. They are part of our community and they do provide an essential service. In my opinion it is essential to strengthen our community with Social Media type of functionality. When you consider the proliferation of Wikimedia related activity on Facebook and LinkedIn, it is obvious to consider Social Media as part of any solution.

There is and there will be a continued vigilance against vandals and trolls. A better understanding of the risks they pose and where they come from will help us develop improved tools for the patrol of recent changes. This helps us open the door. A user interface that is more in-line with what people expect and know will open the door even further.
Thanks,
      GerardM

To get the message out

Lately I have given a considerable amount of time about the Wikimedia Foundation and how it gets its message out. I was thinking in terms of what I would do to improve the amount of information, the quality of the information and the impact of the information.

Blogging

The views per month of the blog look good and, as the authoritative source for information it should be. A blog has more permanence then a post on a mailing list. Blog posts do end up in the results of the search engines. When I consider these statistics to the statistics of this blog, the number of readers will top 20K for May and is growing while the WMF blog relies on scandals to top the 35K mark.

The blog will do better when posts have illustrations and when it changes from announcement driven to story driven. Human stories are also lacking; a story like the one about Alice von Platen or the one about cashew sprouts not only get a surprising number of readers, they allowed me to raise some serious points.

The WikimediaFoundation website
As the Wikimedia Foundation gains more staff, permanent or otherwise, it becomes difficult for the community. The staff page is great but it needs work. Many people are missing and many pictures are three years old or missing. For some people there is a nice introduction but for others the info is a joke.

The community has to deal with these people. They are typically introduced so why not update the staff page at the same time. We are dealing with people and they are interesting .. one of the WMF newbies even has a Kiva background !!

Be good to newbies
Our community has a social problem. You can alleviate social problems with technical aids but in the end it will not work. Social problems take time, attention first. Consider newbie patrol is done by people who are on average still new to Wikipedia. It is sadly considered an entry level activity.

Even though we work hard on usability, Jakob's law indicates why we face an uphill battle: “users spend most of their time on other websites”. We need WYSIWYG even when our grey-beards hate it. We need more social features even when our grey-beards hate it. Technically we have to update the experience people get. This will help us keep our community fresh.
Thanks,
      GerardM

PS I will always consider a good story for on my blog..

The answer to our "most significant challenge": #kittens

Lack of new editors with staying power is #Wikipedia's biggest challenge. What amazes me most in all this is the lack of credible suggestions to alleviate this. The only one I find is to give kittens to people. Not a good idea as kittens become quite rapidly sexually mature and have this nasty habit of becoming octamoms.

It is hard to enter Wikipedia because of the increasing levels of "required" sophistication. This makes Wikipedia more high brow, reliable, wordy and both hard to read and edit. By making quality a priority, Wikipedia is no longer the inviting community it once was. With this change the number and size of illustrations vis a vis the number of words has gone down, the number of foot notes has gone up and developing new templates is a too much for most of our best.

With the number of participants and the quality level a balancing act, there are things we can do to motivate people to stay with the program. The most obvious thing to do is motivating people. As obvious it is to make participating less complicated. There are technical solutions like the Sentence-editing tool by Jan Paul Posma that make editing a lot easier...

An other big group of potential editors is left disenfranchised because they do not have the support for their language on their device. Many of their issues are solvable, it is solvable without a need for more studies or reflection teams. It is solvable when usability and accessibility is truly a primary goal for this year.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Publishing is what you do to get a public

When you google for a definition of "publishing" the first two results are fundamentally different for a writer seeking an audience.

• publication: the business of issuing printed matter for sale or distribution
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information - the activity of making information available for public view. ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing

When publishing is seen as a business, as a writer you hand over your text and wait for it to be published in order to get to an audience. When publishing is a process, printing is one option among others to get information to a public. For the viability of a publishing industry it is important to separate the business from the printing.

When something is to be published, many skills are needed to prepare for publication. The material may need editing, proof reading, peer review, presentation, marketing before it is readied for consumption. The skills involved maximise impact and distribution. Choosing a medium for a publication is one of them.

When publishing is not the printing business, maximising a paying public is what an author looks for. Each medium has its own cost structure and each medium has its own public. Getting this mix right and optimising for a return on investment makes the publishing business a business with a future.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The 10 suggestions

Triggered to name the top #MediaWiki challenges, the rule of not more then 8 paragraphs in a blog post is going to be broken in order to bring to you the top 10 from my point of view.

1 - All development is done to support MediaWiki projects 
MediaWiki projects are collaborative projects aimed at sharing knowledge with a global public. This dictates MediaWiki's functionality and the need for usability for a world audience.

2 - Thou shalt conform to Standards
As Wikimedians can be quite argumentative, one way to prevent fruitless natter is by insisting on standards and best practices. This has the added benefit that we build on the shoulders of giants and make it easier for others to understand what we are on about.

3  - All scripts and languages are equal in our eyes
When the first chapter of the MediaWiki book was written, Unicode and not ASCII was chosen to represent text. This resulted in over 270 languages with active Wikimedia projects. All scripts can do with TLC but improved infrastructure support for scripts results in benefits for many if not most languages.

4 - Internationalisation and localisation are key to fulfil our prime objective
As our projects are to be edited and read by a global audience the totality of the functionality offered needs to be, at a minimum, be internationalised. The linguistic requirements can be quite daunting and we have in translatewiki.net a MediaWiki project that provides a service that is only limited by its developer resources. Localisation itself is left to the language communities.

5 - Thou shalt address men and women with equal respect
The user interface of MediaWiki is for people, men and women, it is them we address. The language should be personal, proper and not stilted. Great texts and great localisations appropriate for a language are a gift to our public and our communities.

6 - Thou shalt use the best technology wherever it comes from
Around MediaWiki a whole ecosystem of extensions and websites evolved. The least they do is function as a proof of concept. Often conceptualising in directions we have feared to tread. Much of this software has awesome potential at it can enable a Wikimedia movement, eg the Wikia social software, the OpenID functionality and last but not least Translate.

7 - Thou shalt know developments by its numbers
Numbers indicate developments of the MediaWiki projects. While MediaWiki is open source, the numbers game is not as open. With a more open structure numbers relevant to our partners can be included and a localised interface will broaden its appeal.

8 - Thou shalt know our craftsmen by their tools
While MediaWiki provides a specialised editing environment, for some of us even more tools help do their job. Some of these tools are highly personal, but many tools have the potential to raise the skill level in our communities. To achieve this, these tools need to gain the attributes of Open Source and be optimised for more general usage.

9 - What you do for the least of us, you do to further the good cause
Never mind how skilled you are, never mind how sublime your tools, there is a limit to what you can do. Only by sharing your experience, your skills and tricks will we realise our goal. Supporting this with newbie incubators and outreach tools we can do more.

10 - Our journey is leading us towards universal information
To make it universal, we have to grow both our traffic and our reach. MediaWiki is our bus, it enables us to move together. It moves easily through the pipes of the Internet and is preparing to make its way with dead wood technology and mobile technology; sneaker net and phones. Our tools open up the new frontiers where our information may help knowledge grow.
Thanks,
      GerardM