Brianna Laugher wrote:
About my comment which projects Board members comment on, I should correct myself, because the wider world rarely cares what the Board members say. To 95% of the world there is only Jimmy. (I guess 4% acknowledge the actual chair of the Board and another 1% acknowledge the rest. maybe less.)
I think you are super optimistic and super pessimist as well on this point. In the USA, I would say that Jimmy is 99%. Beyond Jimbo, there is nothing, a dark pit. This is very boring, but it is a fact. However, in Europe, most conferences and most press interviews are not covered by Jimbo, but by I, or people from the various chapters, or just... participants. From time to time, a request requires Jimbo and no one else, but by and large, the diversity of people disseminating the message is pretty important. Most of those are from Wikipedia, but not all.
For example, the latest press release of the french association, Wikimedia France, deals with the french Wikiversity http://wikimedia.fr/index.php/Communiqu%C3%A9s_de_presse/2000_cours_sur_Wiki... And this press release was rather well relayed and generated some further press interest. After it was published, we received several press requests for more specific interviews... and our big challenge at that time was to find a "strong" participant to the french wikiversity to answer the press.
We changed the journalists !!!
I am hardly joking. We have come to a time when we know several of the journalists regularly writing about us. Or rather, about internet related projects. When you look at a serious monthly, even one with no specialization, you *know* the people in charge of the column related to web 2.0. These guys have done on average one small article about wikipedia every year. And one big study. They *know* and by and large understand the project. They are also ready to talk about something else. This is the type of journalists to focus on.
ant
So really what is accurate to say is that I
find it somewhat disappointing that Jimmy only seems to mention Wikipedia. But probably this is like you say, journalists only want to know about Wikipedia, so they ignore the rest. So then the thing to do is change the journalists. :)
On 12/08/07, Florence Devouard Anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
What would be real cool would be to try to keep a written state of each project, what is hot, what is working, what is not working, technical wish list, biggest issues, big figures etc.... so that all participants could "follow" what is going on. I know all this is actually available, but only in a very dispersed manner, so not so easy to find out.
Such lists tend to be kept up to date for only a month or so. On meta you can find many documents that are relevant to Feb 2006 or whenever.
Partly I think it just the culture of the projects and partly the infrastructure. By 'culture of the projects' I mean you can spend all week inside a single project and still not follow everything, let alone wonder what the rest of the world is doing. Wikis don't have a good way to keep an 'overview' of a project, e.g. "this week's most edited pages" (especially highlighting pages that have a sudden jump in attention). And most Wikimedians are just in love with their project. It takes a long time to grow through the wiki stages to where you want to spread the word about how great your project is, I think. And many contributors may never progress to it or may stop contributing first. And both those things are ok. Too many "meta" people is also a bad state. The people doing the grunt work on the ground are the valuable ones. :)
So that is one thing. The other is the infrastructure.
Lately there have been more and more blogs created that offer a kind of overview of different projects. Why are blogs cool? Blogs are cool because of RSS. I would love to see some RSS technology integrated with MediaWiki -- or else for the Foundation to set up mass blog infrastruture that, say, any administrator or appointed "trusted user" could write to. Unofficial volunteer-written project blogs. It would be seriously cool. Just having the infrastructure in a central place would encourage a lot more people to participate I think.
OK here is an idea for Florence. Write a post to foundation-l addressing all projects (e.g. enwikipedia, frwikisource). Ask them to put together a 'state of the wiki' report, with the things you mentioned:
- progress reports on pages, users, admins, policies
- success of any special projects like printed material, wikiprojects
- any special policy or practice that they have developed, that is not
seen on other projects
- technical wishlist
- "perennial debates" - controversies that often come up in the community
Tell them it's optional to submit a report, and they have a month to write it.
If nothing else it would make for seriously interesting reading. :) And the Board can just, you know, publish it on the foundation wiki. They don't have to do anything else with it. But just having this kind of 'official' request may make people think about these kind of things.
cheers Brianna