On 18/02/2011 23:24, aude wrote:

Heather Ford, a former Wikimedia advisory board member and researcher/writer in South Africa has written an essay, "The Missing Wikipedians" about systematic bias on English Wikipedia (especially) against new users and topics pertinent to Africa and other diverse places/people.

As an example, she cites the English Wikipedia article [[Makmende]] and the deletion request made, biting the newbie.

http://hblog.org/2011/02/16/the-missing-wikipedians/

Please read and discuss. What might we do to help make Wikipedia a more welcoming place for newbies and for such diverse topics?

It is pretty much normal for discussions of (what amount to) the limiting factors on the community to examine multiple strands of argument, inconclusively. This essay is concerned with "local notability", and that is certainly worth parsing out separately, as other strands are.

If the context is Africa, as opposed to India (say) with its very large pools of speakers of non-English vernaculars and vast literatures, there are special aspects. Discussion of Kiswahili is special again, since the native speakers are a relatively small subset of those who speak it as a matter of convenience, in the armed forces and so on.

Trying not to conflate issues (which is the bane of these discussions): I have some idea of the problems of small Wikipedias such as lg.wikipedia.org, from discussions with speakers of Luganda on the ground. Generally, educated Baganda would regard English (as written language) as the natural channel for informing themselves: the Ugandan (Kampala) press is largely in English, though there is a Luganda tabloid. Certain topics such as the clan/surname system would interest them, and there is literature. But lgWP is just on the edge of viability, it seems, at the level of having to repel spam and vandalism. Such communities have to grow themselves first, to get more than a toehold: there are reasons why there are fewer than 300 language editions, which represent around 5% of world languages.

At the intermediate level, and swWP, you could say there is a basic systemic bias issue against East African content crossing into enWP. How bad is it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makerere_University is comparable to http://sw.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuo_Kikuu_cha_Makerere, and the alumnus links seem to be somewhat fuller of blue.

The essay pegs its point on a popular culture article, though. This is what journalists also tend to do: take current affairs, popular culture and BLPs as representative. We should note that many encyclopedias would give you *nothing* on these areas. There are good reasons why these areas are contentious, both for inclusion of topics and for vetting of content. There still is "no free lunch" in this world, and we have discovered the hard way that exclusion of garage bands has a cost. The syllogism is that if you exclude garage bands and suchlike you will offend potential contributors and so damage the growth of the community. This is actually true.

There is a potential cost the other way, though, and this is often left undiscussed. Would "serious encyclopedists" be deterred from contributing to a site that was too MySpace-like? This is the return of the "too much Pokemon and Star Wars" argument in another form. Obviously the answer is that this is also true: enWP's "missing Wikipedians" include those with recondite knowledge who are not donating their time to posting it for us (for example 99.9% of academia). We could postulate a solution to that by upping the prestige of the site to the point that writing an FA could go on a tenure-track person's CV. Another decade for that to happen, though.

Where does this leave us?

1. There is basic ecology - language communities will thrive to a greater or lesser extent according to factors that are largely to do with demographics. 2. "Missing Wikipedians" is always going to be a misnomer. When your readership is in nine figures and the editorship might be in the low six figures, looking at people who say "tried it once and didn't like it" is a way to lose the signal in the noise. 3. All our communities need better care and nurture. The attitudes that will be helpful against systemic bias are pretty much those that work against other negatives (stick with AGF and a universalist outlook, don't shoot from the hip even if you are feeling under pressure, and don't force the issue on contentious matters). 4. Sensitivity to "local notability" ought to be a matter of education (I can see you might think this matters, even if I don't see why). We have a universalist if flawed notion of notability, and one reason it is still there is that it does argue against parochialism.

Setting out my own stall, I think the "old school" approach is still good stuff; and I'm against the unnecessary barriers to entry that are put in place (with good intentions) by those who argue for *immediate* cleanup of problem articles over maintenance and allowing some backlogs - and their allies who want the Manual to impress at whatever cost.

Charles