Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
Meanwhile only two people have signed up for the
Chicago meetup, and
that's counting Jimbo himself. So I just have to ask, where are all
the Chicago Wikipedians? Is there nobody willing to make the trip
even from Wisconsin or Indiana (and Chicago's so much closer to the
state line than Seattle)? Doesn't anybody love Jimbo anymore?
I'm like one of those rock stars only famous in Europe. ;-)
Can't say what things are like on the European side, or give a
representative sample of the US side, but from my limited sample of
people I personally know in the US who are Wikipedians, there's very
little interest in this sort of thing. I'm the only one of the people I
know who does *anything* meta-ish, and most of them think I'm kind of
silly for spending ("wasting") a bunch of time reading and posting to a
Wikipedia mailing list rather than just getting on with it and actually
building the encyclopedia. They generally attribute it to my being in
academia ("you academics like to talk about doing things more than you
like doing things"). If I tell them I'm thinking of actually travelling
to a Wikimedia conference I'll never hear the end of it. =]
Could it be that Europeans see it as more of a
social/community/organization endeavor, whereas Americans see it as more
of simply an internet-based collaborative project and generally don't
care who runs it or how those people run it, so long as the servers stay
up and useful new MediaWiki features periodically show up? I don't know
what the percentage is like for Europeans, but an absolutely miniscule
percentage of Americans are involved in meta-type affairs---a lot of
them donate (the majority of donations are Americans I think) but only a
few dozen out of the thousands are involved in organizational stuff.
Of course, I don't have a big enough sample to make any confident
generalizations, so this is just speculation.
-Mark