Hello Wikipedians, Wikimedians, Wikians and fellow Earthlings, (This ended up as an E-mail with a long introduction, so feel free to skim it. It may still be somewhat entertaining.) first of all, I should note that I'm a guy, so I hope you don't think I'm being too bold here (or "Chutzpah" as they say in Yiddish/American-English), but this story was inspired by my interactions with a female. The female in question is a young Pakistani student of Computer Science, whom I met on the Freenode IRC network (where some of the Wikimedia projects' are hosted). Now, she's interested in programming, and also decided to be interested in white hat hacking in the sense of exploiting programs and remote system (after her Windows XP-using friend was the target of a nasty targetted attack.), and many other computer or non-computer related things. She seems very cool. Now, since she has very good English and also speaks, reads and writes Urdu natively, I told her that the Urdu wikipedia or similar wikimedia projects in Urdu and English could use help, and she said something that seemed innocent at the time, but now seems like a problem: that she was far too busy with her studies during the semester, but would keep it in mind for the vacation. On the other hand, when I studied in the Technion (I graduated in 2003/2004 well before the wikipedia really matured and became the "it" site that it is today), I spent hours of my free time on end, communicating by E-mail with other people, working on my homepage (now on http://www.shlomifish.org/ , though back then, it was far less impressive), working on http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ (Freecell Solver - an open-source project - very niche, but successful, that proved to be a huge time-sink but naturally very fun and enlightening[fc-solve].), and being active in the Haifa Linux Club ( http://www.haifux.org/ ) and some other extra-corricular stuff like that. I am kinda a computer dork naturally, and most females are more into non-computer stuff than I am, but I still think that the young women in question can spend some time translating a few paragraphs from the English wikipedia to the localised wikipedia at a time (and thus slowly but surely create some very quality articles in Urdu/etc. about insert-your-favourite-topic-here). ========================= So I think we should brainstorm ways to make people like that young Pakistani (both men, but especially many women from my impression) try to contribute to Wikimedia projects, Wikia wikis, etc. and other such projects as extra- corricular activities. What kind of arguments can we use? ========================= Regards, Shlomi Fish P.S: naturally, all those extracorricular activities that I mentioned may have had a negative influence on my grade, but, naturally, I kinda felt that dedicating 100% of my time for studies was not something I could honestly get myself to do, because it contradicted my character and interests. I did eventually graduate cum-laude, but with a great spread of grades down to close to 55% which is the passing grade in the Technion. Of course, the Technion lecturers are reportedly kinda obsessed with getting enough students to fail the tests so people won't think their tests were too "easy", which often cause many tests to be excessively long, unfair, cover unseen material or one that is out of the scope of the syllabus, or otherwise too hard. <footnotes> [fc-solve] - it also proved to spark interest among people I've talked with who were familiar with Freecell, due to its immense popularity in Israel out of being the only long-term interesting computer game in pre-XP MS Windows. Some of the people who were impressed by it were also attractive members-of- the-opposite-sex , and not incredibly "nerdy" ones. But I digress. In any case, I spent much more time on Freecell Solver than I ever did contributing to the wikpedias, but that is expected due to the inherent complexity of writing such a program and in the C programming language. It proved of utility in providing citations for statistics in a wikipedia page about the Simple Simon variant of Patience, that it can also solve: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Simon_(solitaire) There's also http://cards.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page , which I've contributed some stuff to inspired by my interest in some card solitaire games and automatically solving them. </footnotes> -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Chuck Norris/etc. Facts - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/facts/ Larry Wall *does* know all of Perl. However, he pretends to be wrong or misinformed, so people will underestimate him. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .