On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 12:40 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 5:19 PM, Robert Rohde
<rarohde(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There are many who seem to feel that using
Wikipedia for socializing
and fun is contrary to our mission, especially if it attracts people
who aren't contributors to the encyclopedia. Personally, I think
that's nonsense, and the community benefits from increased cohesion
when there is fun and socializing to be had, but I realize that many
people don't see it that way.
There are three issues here:
* If the point is that a part of the community doesn't want to have
social networking because of the principles -- besides your (positive)
point -- I have one more (negative): We are not able to choose anymore
what do we like, we are in the critical position and we desperately
need some fresh blood. Even it may be not so obvious at the field,
leaving this discussion for the next year this time -- may be too
late.
* For those who really don't want to have social networking options,
there should be an option "turn it off".
* I think that I am not the only one who is using social networking
sites just to be in touch with friends. And a lot of my friends are
Wikimedians; and I am more interested in their Wikimedian activities
than what did they do at Elven Blood :) However, I think that games at
some future social networking for Wikimedia projects would be much
better: there are a lot of possible educational games which may be
very nice.
On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 5:47 PM, Pharos <pharosofalexandria(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We should keep in mind that there is a much
broader community out
there beyond Wikimedians, who are interested in cooperative efforts in
promoting priojects.
Personally, we've had great success working with the 2 Students For
Free Culture chapters in New York City, who have supported Wikimedia
projects as ardently as any Wikimedians.
On a level of real-life organization, there should be no sharp line
between people with Wikimedia user accounts and those without. The
basic skills in organizing real-life events and projects are
orthogonal to particular technical skills or specializations.
What we really need is a social networking site for the whole Free
Culture/Open Source community, so that we can build a thousand
coalitions in a thousand different cities.
In researching this idea, I happened upon this proposal last year from
the Free Software Foundation for a "Planet Libre":
http://www.libervis.com/article/july_2007_letter_to_free_software_foundatio…
That particular initiative appears to have foundered over recent
months. I suggest we should revive it, and in cooperation with Free
Software Foundation, develop a "Planet Libre" social networking site
based on Elgg.
I would like to see such social networking site. But, I am skeptical
about making one another social networking site. I've got calls for
some academic and free society social networking sites, but I don't
see them as active. Maybe it may function in some areas, like Orkut
functions well in Brazil (I saw one more in Russia and one more in
India). But, none of them is near to even MySpace, not to talk about
Facebook.
At the other side, Wikipedia has the potential to gather significant
community. We don't even need a notice at the site. We just need to
make it and to tell that to the world. And we will be in this position
for some time; at least until Wikipedia is at the top ten sites. Also,
I am sure that free software community would treat Wikimedia social
networking platform as their own.
If we pursue an idea of this kind, we could implement some kind of
"Wikicommunity" features in userspace.
Possibly we could have some minimal standards of being an actual
contributor before the Wikicommunity feature is activated for a
particular user.
This would be a check on non-Wikimedians using us as their Myspace alternative.
Thanks,
Pharos
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