Why when we talk about "editor engagement" we think exclusively about new editors? How about retaining people, who already made Wikipedia (= the product) and keep maintaining it? Wikimania and Community Fellows, and other initiatives do exactly this, providing incentives for people to look beyond the text and extend the Community off-line - the Movement.
Any scientist would tell you that maintaining - and returning to - the exponential growth is unrealistic, as unrealistic to expect that new Visual Editor will suddenly attract a wave of the new editors. The bubble burst, the fashion to edit Wikipedia has gone where most of the personal pages, blogs etc. gone, contributing to Wikipedia is a niche hobby, so it is important to help people who are already engaged - including and doubly important in the Global South.
If the management prefers to concentrate on "the product development" (very corporate speak, a bit strange if we talking about free Encyclopaedia), it will eventually lose the community. The product (content) is underdeveloped - working parts, not just shiny bits and only Community can develop it.
It's as if Wikitravel story did not teach anything beyond "we win again".
Victoria
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 1:44 AM, Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.comwrote:
On Oct 20, 2012 6:36 PM, "Mono" monomium@gmail.com wrote:
The WMF should spend less time thinking about what to do and more time doing it. That means they can't do everything under the moon. But
everyone
knows that big things need to happen.
Well said. That is precisely why these changes are being proposed: taking some things off the table will help us get shit done. It's not the only part of being able to more rapidly ship new products, by far, but being clear about our scope as an organzation will go a long way.
On Fri, Oct 19, 2012 at 5:01 AM, Виктория mstislavl1@gmail.com wrote:
This proposal reminds me of "management buyout", which Wikipedia
defines as
"form of acquisition where a company's existing managers acquire a
large
part or all of the company from either the parent company or from the private owners".
There always been ambiguity to the roles of WMF - does it have right to interfere with Community decisions, especially highly controversial
ones?
In what form it should communicate with highly dispersed, varied
community.
I cannot say that I completely agreed with "5 year plan", but at least
it
have given a clear directions and even (some, not all) achievable
goals:
attraction of new editors, including women, helping the Global South to access free knowledge. Of course, not all initiatives were working,
but at
least the was movement in the right direction.
I understand that it wasn't easy for the WMF employees, but we all hope that working for a non-profit organisation is not just a day, 9 to 5
job
(which are disappearing fast anyway). And now the management found how
to
end all this - curtail awkward, highly demanding activities on the
ground
in less civilised world and concentrate on relatively easy, structured work, which can be done in sunny San Francisco - engineering and "grant making".
I cannot say anything against engineering, this is a cornerstone,
although
I cannot see how management, Legal etc. engagement with "people on the ground" have interfered with programmers work and how "refocusing" will help to create Visual Editor. My worry is about "grant making", forgive me, I am not a native speaker, so I can just guess that this means
"grant
distributing".
When the chapters started appearing, I thought they will be local WMF, which will build bridges between WMF and local communities. This is not what happened. I don't want to go into details as to why, but Fir WMF
had
already withdrawn support for the Chapter fundraising through the
banner,
and now if I understand correctly the Chapters re supposed to fend for themselves completely - they want to do it anyway, but this is a
different
story.
So WMF will collect the money and then will distribute it by the means unknown. As a former member of the Grant Committee I can say that the current process is not very efficient and there is no alternative
proposed.
And if WMF focus on distributing grants instead of helping directly,
it
will become incredibly difficult for people with no experience in a
highly
specific task of grant-writing (=community members) to get their initiatives off the ground, and the money will go to third parties.
During
the "restructuring time" WMF will stop supporting really working things such as Wikimania, leaving it to fend for itself, just like chapters.
I wonder at what point European Chapters, lead by highly efficient
German ,
will realise that they don't need WMF, buy servers and fork.
I can only hope that the Board will not agree with this proposal and
WMF
will find some other way to reduce work-related stress.
Victoria _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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