[Foundation-l] We have the problem

Wed Oct 29 23:17:39 UTC 2008

milos, this is indeed a pressing problem, thank you for writing about it at
such length.  my added concerns:

+ if the wikipedia we know wanes, the memory of how we accomplished it may
wane as well.  note that similarly effective projects have not sprung up in
other areas where they miht naturally do so.

+ we are not addingnew faets to the projects, though there are dozens if not
hundreds to be added.new topicsets, new sources of raw data, more efficient
feeds from news, publishers, &c.

+ we are not talking so seriously these days about improving
accessibility.   it would be great to have roadmaps for better
automatically-or-other spoken articles, simple creation of offline
collections, automatic-or-other language-simplificatino for less advanced
speakers/readers...  this used to take up proportionally much more of our
time.

+ we are not talking uch about the philosophy of wiki and
collaboration.again, thisused to take up fully 10% of the time spent on the
project, and the dilemmas and concerns facing collaboration on our new
million-persn scales are equally danting and amazing starting from knowledge
of solutionsto 1000-person problems as the original problems were.
community members dont feel free to experiment with philosophy the way they
once were, and perhaps we are not as a social group as attracive apace to
have those debates as before.

birgitte, you are right that this is a real communication dilemma, without a
simple solution such as 'just making more of an effort'.

sj,
in peru, thinking about culture gaps in communication
[I just visited the national library in lima, where they are great fans of
wikipedia...]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:06 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>
> wrote:
> > Pedro Sanchez wrote:
> >> Alternatively, we've learn not to go into long long nitpicking threads.
> >> So this is better, less volume, but signal/noise increases.
> >>
> >> I'm even reading some threads now instead of automatically canning them.
> >>
> >> Beware of the emailpostcountitis!
> >>
> > I agree with this, especially as it relates to recent activity. My sense
> > is that recent discussions on this list have been very useful (including
> > this thread), quite a bit more than they were roughly a year ago.
> > Anyway, using my rough impressions as a guide, I find basically no
> > correlation between the volume of messages and the quality.
> >
> > This is not to say that activity levels aren't something to be concerned
> > about, although I might want to start with a focus on something other
> > than this mailing list. But sometimes lots of visible activity reflects
> > (or promotes) lots of productive work; sometimes lots of activity simply
> > means we're bogged down in things that are keeping us from productivity;
> > sometimes visible activity is lower because we're busy being productive
> > in other ways; and sometimes activity is lower because we're not as
> > involved in the projects. Using a two-directional measurement to
> > describe phenomena with at least four possible compass points will only
> > be a very small start, from an analytical perspective.
>
> Pedro's email is very subjective and as such is a part of widespread
> problem (just one digression: I was the part of that problem, too;
> especially during the previous years, so, this is not a personal
> attack): we tend to lie ourselves and to interpret data as everything
> is going on fine -- while it is far from truth. The most "objective"
> part was not proven: signal/noise ratio may or may not increase with
> the less volume of emails. It is related just to ability of some
> persons to handle such amount of emails (which is other type of
> problems, while it is still a problem).
>
> At the other side, (I have to say) after the second reading, I
> realized that Michael's second paragraph is, at least, in a good
> direction. While I would like to see suggestions what to measure,
> generally asking for deeper analysis is a step forward.
>
> There are a number of possible indicators which may be measured very
> easy. This time, I made a statistics of new persons on foundation-l
> list per month. It is worst than the previous results: October has two
> times less new persons at the list than the next worst October (2004)
> had. Actually, it is the worst month *at all* -- after August of 2004
> (6) and July of this year (7). September is the worst September for
> all years. August is slightly better than August 2004, July is the
> worst July ever, May and June are somewhat better than the the worst
> May and June (2005).
>
> And, again, numbers of new participants of this list tend to be higher
> in the second part of the year, while this October has the lowest
> number of new users for this year (and not just for this year, as I
> said before).
>
> 2004    xxx     xxx     xxx     13      31      25      13      6       22
>      9       8       9
> 2005    17      21      10      8       9       9       8       18      15
>      10      15      16
> 2006    21      12      18      16      18      20      15      28      25
>      17      20      28
> 2007    19      26      13      21      22      18      18      19      14
>      15      21      19
> 2008    23      11      24      15      12      11      7       8       12
>      4       xxx     xxx
>
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