Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

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Kumioko
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Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by Kumioko » Fri Nov 15, 2019 12:13 pm

So effective today Liam wyatt, a long time Wikipedian in residence, will now be working at the WMF as a project coordinator for wikicite. Yet again the WMF jobs program hires someone from the volunteer community that won't change the culture; won't rock the boat and will help make the koolaid!
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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by sashi » Fri Nov 15, 2019 8:38 pm

I can confirm that Phoebe Ayers mentioned he was the project coordinator in the Sunday morning session on WikiCite. (Day 2 AM Session Wiki-conference, from 1:59:00 or so... Wyatt is mentioned around 2:08:00)

You have to look on the sidebar for the right video. The amphi resembles a Vegas-pink pool hall at first glance.

Also, while we're talking tech... what is hydrawiki? I looked for a mediawiki video embedder and stumbled on a curious github page leading straight into TOR.

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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittyllama now a WMF employee

Post by Kumioko » Sat Nov 16, 2019 2:18 pm

Well no one should really trust ANYTHING the WMF says and I got that information straight from Liam's twitter page, which was forwarded by one of the WMF ones as a welcome tweet. Now since neither twitter or the WMF projects are trustworthy sources, it's hard for me to say that these should be "trusted". But I am taking Liam's own words at face value and assuming he isn't lying to everyone on his twitter account:

Here is the URL though, go judge for yourself if this is trustworthy or not.
Link: https://twitter.com/Wittylama/status/1195289387732520960
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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by sashi » Sun Nov 17, 2019 5:19 pm

I see a lot of posts were deleted from this thread (my post above was actually originally post#3 after someone called into question the interest of Kumioko's report). For the record, it's an interesting report, because WikiCite is probably a useful project, but it does need to be powered underneath language-specific templates (i.e. at wikidata).

Did you see that former signpost EiC Pete Forsyth / WikiStrategies reappeared at the conference, Kumioko? If I understood correctly their team was supposed to add 1000 local newspapers to en.wp or wikidata and only did about a third of that...

I wonder what went wrong?

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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by Kumioko » Sun Nov 17, 2019 5:41 pm

sashi wrote:I see a lot of posts were deleted from this thread (my post above was actually originally post#3 after someone called into question the interest of Kumioko's report). For the record, it's an interesting report, because WikiCite is probably a useful project, but it does need to be powered underneath language-specific templates (i.e. at wikidata).

Did you see that former signpost EiC Pete Forsyth / WikiStrategies reappeared at the conference, Kumioko? If I understood correctly their team was supposed to add 1000 local newspapers to en.wp or wikidata and only did about a third of that...

I wonder what went wrong?

Due to poor moderation a lot of posts here are randomly deleted or moved causing a lot of the threads to be confusing to follow.
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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by JuiceBeetle » Sun Nov 17, 2019 5:44 pm

sashi wrote:I see a lot of posts were deleted from this thread

Yes, I've moved the off-topic back-and-forth. I'm sorry I left a notification only in that thread, hoping that I don't have to leave an off-topic post in place of many.
I'll move the above post too.

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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Nov 17, 2019 7:02 pm

Liam Wyatt is not responsible for changing the culture of Wikipedia/WMF/the movement, much less rocking any boats.

I don't know this for sure, but I'm confident that if/when anyone links to something that actually explains what his new job actually entails, it will be clear enough for readers.

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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by sashi » Sun Nov 17, 2019 7:11 pm

It does seem to be an important donation-getter.

I had a brief look into the strategy movement narrative about advocacy via centralized discussion (what does that HOW paragraph even mean?).

Reading the talk page, I learned that there was someone with the job-title Information and Knowledge Manager.

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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by CrowsNest » Sun Nov 17, 2019 7:39 pm

sashi wrote:It does seem to be an important donation-getter.
So what?

I am waiting for an explanation of what cultural change a Project Coordinator for WikiCite is supposedly responsible for achieving.

That image doesn't help at all, if anything it shows the role is probably about as business as usual as you can get. Pretend you're helping volunteer fuckwits to build a knowledge base, and collect the profits. Literally business as usual.

If the complaint is that the WMF is hiring people to do what the WMF does, well, duh. Thanks for the news, but they fucking hire quite a few people in a calendar year, are we going to get breathless first hand reports for every single one?

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Re: Liam's wyatt, aka Wittylama now a WMF employee

Post by Kumioko » Sun Nov 17, 2019 11:58 pm

JuiceBeetle wrote:
sashi wrote:I see a lot of posts were deleted from this thread

Yes, I've moved the off-topic back-and-forth. I'm sorry I left a notification only in that thread, hoping that I don't have to leave an off-topic post in place of many.
I'll move the above post too.

Which is why I generally don't spend much time writing anything. I never know when it's going to be moved, deleted or cut because you don't agree. No point wasting time researching and writing when there's at least a 30% chance it's going to get deleted or cut anyway.
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