Gregory Maxwell:
> The reason "how we have not reached large parts of the world yet" is
> because access to Wikipedia is significantly influenced by things
> outside of Wikimedia's control and scope.
> I think a reasonable argument can be made that Wikimedia's actions
> could not produce a statistically significant improvement in the
> penetration vs population metric; simply because the causative factors
> outside of our ability to influence are so large.
Here we totally disagree, and I hope and expect the outcomes of the strategy
process will prove you wrong over time.
I am not saying it is easy to reach out where we have not done so yet, but
we overcame more hurdles.
> but perhaps I did not state this bluntly enough:
You usually have no problems with being blunt (and obfuscating your posts
with rather pointless sarcasms) That was me being blunt BTW
> Failure to consider this leads to bizarre conclusions like "the lower
> birth rates in the developed world compared to the developing world
> decrease Wikimedia's success over time".
QED
> Surely someone must have a respectable count of internet users by
> language that we could use for comparison?
Thanks in advance for pointing me there.
> If we had a goal to double the number of articles in some reasonable
> period of time we could do it. If we had a goal to double the
> penetration, ... well, unless the WMF changes its mission nothing it
> could do would get us there.
Please check mission statement
Erik Zachte
Thanks for all feedback,
To be sure, I do not think participation level as a metric makes other
metrics obsolete. My blog post can be read as forget article count, embrace
participation instead but that pushes things too far.
There are other metrics that bear witness of our accomplishments, but are
more meaningful than article count (which will always be a nice trivia).
Examples are: article views per hour, unique visitors, percentage of
potential audience reached (unique visitors per million speakers). All of
these seem better than the static 'article count' because they focus on
whether and how much our content is being used, in other words on the
relevancy of our work for the readers.
I can see that for outward communication we still need to emphasize somehow
that we do matter by telling what we achieved.
I would hope that internally we focus on metrics that point to the future,
to what is yet to be achieved, and what can serve as inspiration. In that
context participation level has its place.
Percentage of potential audience reached (see above) shares a characteristic
with participation level, namely that the largest languages don't
automatically get all attention. At the other hand any ordering scheme that
lets the 'Volapüks' of this world take top rank is putting the horse behind
the cart. By the way right now we cannot yet measure unique visitors per
project ourselves.
----
In summary I would suggest: let us downplay article counts in future
external communications, and present our achievements in a way that
emphasizes how we matter to the public.
For ourselves let us celebrate language communities that thrive, and focus
on building communities where they are absent, or small compared to their
potential, the rest will follow.
----
I would of course welcome advanced analysis of relations between metrics. My
hunch is that advanced analysis will yield interesting but complex
dependencies, and possibly produce multi-factorial composite metrics, which
will be less suitable as primary ordering principle, as they are above most
people heads.
Compare economics. News media present simple metrics like inflation rate,
unemployment rate, gross national product. Each of these is too broad to be
useful for advanced economic analysis, yet apparently best abstraction level
for general discussions.
Erik Zachte
This too should get wider distribution!
Cheers,
Kat
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)free.fr>
Date: Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 2:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Commons-l] a heads-up on Wikimedia France's adventures
with the French cultural authorities
To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List <commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Of special relevance to us is this section of the report:
Second recommendation
Lift the obstacles to the presence of French data on collaborative sites
Context
The Internet has changed because of the development of a multitude of
personal sites, as well as a new generation of platforms and services
whose content is provided by “communities”, some of which have become
powerful international industries. Thus, the sites Wikipedia around the
world welcome a total of 240 million unique visitors a month and the
site in French 10 million unique visitors a month. The articles on these
sites on topics related to France are currently illustrated by amateur
photographs, or photographs from foreign collections.
Arguments
When an encyclopedic site such as Wikipedia needs photographs of
Egyptian antiquities in order to get illustrations for its articles, it
calls a museum. For the Louvre, accepting to donate its photographs
would significantly augment their exposure to the world and, thus, the
visibility of the museum as opposed to, say, the British Museum or the
Cairo Museum. All the more, the presentation of paintings or drawings of
Ingres on a site with such a high number of visitors would be positive
for the museum of Montauban.
The presence of public cultural data on community-run platforms would
augment their visibility and that of the public organizations that
provided them, both nationally and internationally.
Nevertheless, some legal obstacles currently hinder agreements with
these platforms. Indeed, because these sites are mostly constituted of
texts written and posted by private individuals, they propose so-called
“free” licenses which are in certain respects incompatible with current
French intellectual property law : no royalties for right holders,
indefinite rights of reuse, incompatibility with certain moral rights.
Therefore, a common ground should be reached so that these legal
difficulties are not insurmontable.
Conditions for fulfilling this recommendation
Elaborate and implement a specific reflection that would take into
account the forces of the parties, the potential gains for visibility of
the data and public cultural institutions, and the legal obstacles of
the exposition of our public data on collaborative sites. Such an
agreement would evidently include restrictions on the resolution of
photographs or videos put online and the obligation to create links,
which could maximize the flow of visits and income to the donating
institutions and the distribution pole considered (RMN, INA, etc.).
[Note of translator: the report suggests centralizing the currently
dispersed system for licensing of public works on a few number of poles,
such as the Reunion of national museums (RMN; museum photographs) and
the National audiovisual institute (television archives).]
_______________________________________________
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Dear Foundation-istas,
It looks like sometime this summer the composition of the Advisory
Board changed, with several of the original members becoming former
members:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Advisory_Board&diff=39660&…
I don't remember an announcement about this. Did I miss it? Is this an
annual sort of advisory board restructuring, or something else? Was it
discussed somewhere? It's helpful to know who the advisory board
members are, and I didn't think they had any specific 'terms of
office' -- do they?
thanks!
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *
2009/9/22 Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com>:
> No David, I have already stated that the best thing to do at this point is
> step back and examine the differing assumptions that made this thread
> nonproductive. My previous attempts to clarify matters with specific
> examples led to accusations that I had taken the thread off topic. I will
> not go down that path again in this discussion. Particularly not when the
> audience is as hostile as you have been. That way lieth the flame war.
Unfortunately, you will not convince people who don't already agree
with you that there's any problem if you resort to namecalling, as you
did, and claiming "hostility" when people don't agree with you or
claim "personal attacks" when they ask you to clarify the bits that
don't make sense. So I hope you won't do that again, since I do think
you had a point in there somewhere.
- d.
2009/9/22 Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com>:
> When this thread began I hoped more people would comb the collection in
> search of copyleft license violations. We have been losing FP volunteers
> over license violation problems.
That's a large statement, and it needs substantiation to convince.
Please list the examples you are thinking of.
> It doesn't come as too much of a surprise
> to see confusion emerge instead. But David, to construct a cherry picked
> insult is beneath you. With your long commitment to free culture, I really
> expected better.
WTF. Remember that I'm one of the few here loudly agreeing with you
about crediting restorers. Steve's questions were entirely reasonable
and I was wondering what your answers to them were myself. Acting as
though I'm some sort of traitor for asking you to substantiate and
reinforce your arguments says nothing good about the quality of your
arguments or the robustness and clarity of your thinking on them.
Are you literally unable to answer the questions? If so, then you will
have no luck getting many people to agree that your concerns are
concerns.
Steve's original question:
"I still wish you would answer the original question: why are you
angry, what do you think they have done wrong, and how do you think
they were supposed to know that wanted to be credited, based on the
information on the relevant image pages? Or did you really just want
to start an open discussion about the
creativity involved in image restoration?"
You started this thread in two mailing lists, presumably with the
intent of convincing people who didn't realise there was a problem
that there was a problem. Now you're descending to namecalling at the
slightest questioning of your arguments. C'mon, meet us half way here.
- d.