I think a sub page of metawiki page for the wikimedia India could be a better page to discuss multi-wiki things than having it in many places. Individual wikis may hold the vote for their spokes person/rep and report it back in Meta pages. Regards, Jyothis. http://www.Jyothis.net http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis woods are lovely dark and deep, but i have promises to keep and miles to go before i sleep and lines to go before I press sleep completion date = (start date + ((estimated effort x 3.1415926) / resources) + ((total coffee breaks x 0.25) / 24)) + Effort in meetings On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 1:33 AM, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <rsrikanth05(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Shiju, I agree Wiki editing and Wiki advocacy are two different things. Even for the Global Wikimedia Foundation not all advisers and promoters are active wiki editors. But both these kind of people should have been introduced to each other, have good faith and act in total sync. Regarding Tamil Wiki case, this fraud guy hasn't made a single edit in Ta wiki. Not sure if he has a user account and he never passed any information to the community of what he was doing in the name of Tamil wiki. This is unacceptable. As you noted, we are also carefully watching active interest regarding wiki from various corners. Reasons to watch: 1. To protect from vested interests. Many have their own selfishness, agenda. 2. To ensure organic growth and evolution of Wikis. If some NPO / Govt is going to donate 1 lakh articles to our wikis, it hears so sweet. But the reality it is so hard to ensure wiki standards, formats, prinicples if so many articles come at a single time from people who don't understand what is wiki. Slow and steady can be better sometimes. Wikipedia is not just the number of articles, funds etc., Any sort of good contribution can only come from who understands the nature and spirit of Wiki philosophy. The increase in articles and active wikipedians should follow a similar growth rate to ensure the usefulness of wiki. I strongly believe wiki is driven by the philosophy and contributors who adhere to it. Hi Yellow Monkey, For diplomatic reasons I can't name the man in public. Many of the Indic Wikipedians are aware of the issue and may share the name privately during meetups. The point is World has enough conmans and we should be prepared :) Hi Srikanth, Wiki / open source has a very different working culture from all projects in earth :) people have difficulty understanding it. People are so used to work under some big leader, many small leaders :) Wiki is as much a cultural revolution as a knowledge revolution. Hi Jyothis, Yes, a Wikimedia subpage will be good to document contact persons across all Indic Wikipedias. Regarding the mechanism for election in Tamil Wikipedia: Considering the urgency of the situation, we just proposed a initial set of 12 long serving wikipedians (including non-sysops) across different states and countries. And they were all elected unanimously with a single election until this year end. Among them 5 have been given the responsibility to conduct talks with Govt if needed. Later, we will draft formal procedures and qualifications for this responsibility like we do for sysop elections. We also plan to rotate the responsibilities among us and include all who are genuinely interested. Ravi