On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Amir E. Aharoni, 29/07/2012 20:27:
In the 2012-13 WMF plan document I saw an interesting thing: "We’ve hosted key community stakeholders such as English Wikipedia’s ArbCom and Portuguese Wikipedia’s top contributors, in an effort to better understand and respond to issues they're facing." (page 41).
I was very happy to read this. In general, I hope that such focused meetings will be held with more language communities. I don't think that I need to explain why :)
I'm not sure I like the idea of "key community stakeholders", but I agree. The following passage is interesting as well, in fact I had forwarded it to WikiIT-l already:
«In response, in 2012-13 we intend to invest in more thoroughly understanding the non-en-WP communities, and growing our social and political capital. To that end, we will build a team of three community advocates inside the Legal and Community Advocacy department, with the goal of better understanding the non-English language communities, particularly German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, French and Italian. We will also recruit an additional 5-10 experienced community members as short-term WMF fellows.»
Nemo
Yes! This is part of an interesting and difficult long-term problem that I think we are all familiar with -- how to capture common views and concerns from a set of diverse communities, especially when no one person is responsible for being a "representative" of any particular community -- and, for the WMF, how to support all of the projects (not just some of them!). While the little tangent about the annual plan in this thread is, I think, overly hostile and pedantic -- many, many items are condensed and summarized in the annual plan, believe me -- the point that no one individual or group can speak for any particular wiki, and that we should always be careful about being accurate about this, is certainly true.
But, that said, trying to figure out representative project concerns from a wide swath of projects, summarizing them, and then doing something about it is absolutely needed. I think there is very much a need and desire from everyone involved with, for instance, building software or helping with community support to make sure the end result works for and supports all of the projects in all languages and is not biased towards one language or wiki culture. This is (as Oliver notes) one of our grand challenges as a community and movement -- an unsolved, difficult and crucial problem.
I'm not sure if in the long term focusing on specific language communities and recruiting fellows is the sustainable answer for the WMF -- actually I'm pretty sure it isn't -- but I also don't think it can hurt to try and build a deep (and as Amir notes cross-project translated) analysis of how different communities work, and this work will provide the basis for thinking about project comparisons. This is one of the deep gaps in the current Wikipedia research, too, and I'd love to see either the WMF or the research community (or both) do some deeper work into analyzing classes of projects as well as individual projects -- do very small Wikipedias share a set of needs? What about medium-sized ones? Do Asian-language projects share concerns or similar community structures? etc etc.
And, I would love to see us build a stronger structure for transmitting community concerns up to the WMF/chapters/developers/etc, and vice versa: we should work on rebuilding the embassy and ambassador network, creating translation and interwiki portals for small languages on those projects, and so on.
best, phoebe