I don't think trying to gather and follow up the ideas in this thread at e new project page is "creating a new institution". I'm with Michael here, trying to sort this out on-wiki could indeed help "change the people and the way they work".
Posting at Commons:Village Pump could help bring up more ideas, brainstorm and attreact interrest - but VP is not a very suitable place to actually develop sustainable solutions. Neither is no:Tinget or sv:bybrunnen.
Finn Rindahl
2008/12/12 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se
Michael Maggs wrote:
(1) That the ideas in this thread be captured, and copied to Commons under a new project page called (eg) Commons: Outreach.
In my country (Sweden) there was a heated discussion in the 1960s that universities had become too specialized. Literature professors didn't speak to professors in chemical engineering. There was a rough concensus that more interdisciplinary studies were needed. So, in 1970 when a new university was founded, what did they do? They founded a department of interdisciplinary studies. The new department attracted some professors of interdisciplinary science, which are now about to retire. But the literature professors and the professors of chemical engineering still don't talk to each other.
What can we learn from this? We must change the people and the way they work, not create new institutions.
Wikimedia Commons already has a village pump, and it's not overly full with discussions. Today I (user:LA2) brought up some strange upload patterns that I observed in five new users. At first I thought they were sock puppets for a single, large scale copyvio. But it is more likely they are students in a science project. The problem is that we have no way to communicate with them or their teacher. They have all received the standard welcome template on their user talk page, but nobody seems to bother. Try to find the people behind these user names and ask them what's going on. That would be practical outreach. No new page is needed.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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