On 5/8/07, Dmcdevit dmcdevit@cox.net wrote:
Kelly Martin wrote:
Indeed, the proper response to the lower profile of the other projects is to advertise them more heavily, not to submerge them further.
This may or may not be off topic, but one thing we are terrible at is cross-project community support. The submerged projects are largely our own doing. Mostly this is because most editors are (and I mean this factually, not disparagingly) wrapped up in their own work and project, and not necessarily connected to the wider Wikimedia mission or free content, and not well-acquainted with the other projects.
It seems to me that not very many people at all are connected to the wider Wikimedia mission. And those that are, in most if not all instances, are *more* connected to an individual project than they are to the mission of Wikimedia in general.
I'm not at all sure how to solve this, and even less sure about a solution which has any chance of being accepted.
This really is an example of the group being its own enemy. The core group of Wikimedians is getting overruled by an overabundance of respect for the individual rights of people who don't care about Wikimedia at all. From http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html:
"In the early Nineties, a proposal went out to create a Usenet news group for discussing Tibetan culture, called soc.culture.tibet. And it was voted down, in large part because a number of Chinese students who had Internet access voted it down, on the logic that Tibet wasn't a country; it was a region of China. And in their view, since Tibet wasn't a country, there oughtn't be any place to discuss its culture, because that was oxymoronic.
Now, everyone could see that this was the wrong answer. The people who wanted a place to discuss Tibetan culture should have it. That was the core group. But because the one person/one vote model on Usenet said "Anyone who's on Usenet gets to vote on any group," sufficiently contentious groups could simply be voted away. "
When I read that, I couldn't help but think about Wikimedia. Your example regarding transwiking is an example of much the same thing.
Anthony