Poe, Marshall wrote:
Re Angela's mention of the "community"
discussing and deciding things.
Just how many folks are subscribed to Foundation-l? What percentage of
them actually contribute to Foundation-l when a new project is proposed,
or a question is raised? I've spent a lot of time on a lot of lists
(founded and moderated one for three years), and this one is, well,
quite inactive. And not only that, it's sometimes not very civil (e.g.
"Do it yourself").
Communities are groups of individuals with common interests who unite to
further those interests. They have to contribute. They have to be
helpful. Do the subscribers to Foundation-l contribute? Are they
helpful? A more basic question: do they even have common interests?
One difficulty in identifying what the "community" is is that Wikipedia
is now so large that there's no monolithic community. I would say most
Wikipedians aren't subscribed to this mailing list, or indeed to any of
the Wikipedia mailing lists. Some people participate in community
discussions in other locations, like Wikipedia:Village_pump on the
English Wikipedia, and others stick to only discussing within particular
topic areas and sets of articles they happen to be interested in. Many
people have opinions or ideas for specific meta-type issues, but only a
relatively small subset is interested in keeping abreast of all of them,
and that subset is who tends to be on these mailing lists sort of by
definition.
Which leads to an interesting organizational problem. =]
-Mark