[Wikimedia-l] Board vote on narrowing focus

[Mark]

On 11/2/12 6:43 PM, Sarah Stierch wrote:
> If you live outside of Washington, D.C. and New York City vicinities, 
> the Wikipedia world in the US is a VERY lonely place. Perhaps not for 
> everyone, but for many more than you'd think. I meet Wikipedians in 
> the US who have no clue there is a grant program. Like some countries 
> in global south - I know Wikipedians in Chicago who attend meet-up's 
> with 2 people on a regular basis. I mean Chicago? Really? Yup.

True to some extent, but I think a lot of U.S. Wikipedians are active, 
just in a more decentralized, "movement-lite" manner where they stick to 
editing and ignore the meta-stuff. Heck, I've been editing en.wiki for 
~10 years, and have made >40,000 edits, so am "active" in a sense, but I 
didn't know there was a grant program either. And I've been to maybe 3 
meetups ever! I'm even more "meta-active" than most Wikipedians I know, 
having gone to *any* meetups, and being subscribed to a mailing list. 
The other Wikipedia-editing folks I know tend to just see themselves as 
people who edit Wikipedia in an area they're interested in (mostly math, 
cs, or history), but don't want the commitment of joining a Movement or 
organization or social scene. It's sort of a different approach to being 
a "Wikipedian" I guess: a lightweight commitment where it's just a thing 
you can do, if you have some spare time on a weekend and find an 
interesting subject to improve.

Now as for whether that's more prevalent in the U.S. than elsewhere, 
and/or why that'd be, I have no idea.

-Mark