On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 4:05 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
I must disagree that the systematic problem is that we don't care enough. I would say it is that we cannot communicate effectively. The barriers to communication throughout Wikimedia are real and not just due to some lack of caring.
From my experience, a lot of Wikimedians don't know for this list.
When I am the first person who introduces a Wikimedian with 2 years of experience (and I didn't do that just once) that this list exists and that it is the right place for talking about general issues -- I may conclude that we have a [systematic] communication problem.
If you think about languages as barriers, they are not *so* significant to become a "real problem". The most of Wikimedians are able to read English. Also, there is no need that every Wikimedian knows English, there is a need for just one or few of them per community.
And "caring enough" may mean different things than just passive involvement: - Analyzing which communities are under-represented at the common communication channels (foundation-l, Meta, even English language Planet Wikimedia) - Finding interested persons and educate them how to participate in the global matters. - Taking care that this process is going well.
Whenever I am able, I am trying to educate Wikimedians how to become more involved in global matters. The problem about that is that I am able to have such communication with not so significant number of them. Every of them is a person and I am a person :) We are making personal relations and it is not possible to make infinite number of personal relations; actually, possible number is very low in comparison with the size of the Wikimedian community.
This means that we need more involved Wikimedians to work on that, as well as we need to educate "new" Wikimedians to be able to educate others. This is a hard and long term work, but I don't see better way. Yes, there are more efficient ways which should be helping tools (at least, the whole Wikimedia is about education). However, if we don't know a particular community, if we don't know their problems, we are not able to tell them the right advice.