On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
- Communication between projects are at the positive zero. Yes, there
are some communication, but it is more than very poor. At the other side, I don't see systematic work toward making the communication better. Without communication, we have separate projects hosted at WMF servers, nothing more.
I care a lot about inter-project communication. (On the other hand, i love learning foreign languages. Not everybody is like me.)
Recently i started a new page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization
It is an attempt to establish a new culture of discussion about interwiki links. The response has been surprisingly positive: a lot of people understood the instructions that i made up out of the blue and started new discussions.
So, well... communication between projects is not at the absolute zero, but it is still quite close to that. I can identify several reasons for low communication between projects:
1. Most people don't know foreign languages well, and even if they do know them, they mostly write in one of them. They may be unsure about their spelling abilities and well, not much can be done about that. Or they are reluctant to interfere in a different community. For example, i write a lot in Hebrew and English and those two communities are quite different, but i am able to fit into both. I write comparatively little in the Russian Wikipedia, even though it is my native language, because its community is even more different (in the issues of NPOV, Verifiability and copyright, for example).
2. People may dislike other projects. As i already said above, i dislike certain aspects of the Russian Wikipedia. Some - definitely not all - Hebrew Wikipedians strongly dislike the English one, because they consider it to be "extremely inclusionist" (i disagree, but that's what they think).
3. Communities like their autonomy: I like the en.wiki policies on verifiability, notability, templates, userboxes, deletion discussion, appointing admins, etc.; I find them logical and i wish that all Wikipedias would adopt them. But some people who dislike certain aspects of another project may consider it so important that they would dislike the whole project because of that and wouldn't even want to hear about its positive sides and learn from them. Hence, a lot of wheel reinventing happens. So maybe the foundation could try to force some global policies? Probably not: Since communities like their autonomy and many editors would retire if policies would be stuck down their throats.
4. Quite simply, extra boldness is required to look into a new project after you are already used to one. Many people may often go and visit their parents or uncles in another town, but rarely visit the neighbor next door.