Thank you so very much for your reply, Anasuya and Asaf. And sorry you've been ill :(
Your message was so helpful - thank you for explaining how the decisions were made, and for writing that you are open to changes in the strategy as you learn more about this process. That is much appreciated :) I also want to say that I don't want this to be seen as an attack on the strategy. I think you have done such great work already, and more importantly, have been open to learning from your mistakes (as we have as we've gone through this process with you) at a time when there has been tremendous changes at the Foundation - all of which I appreciate. I just think that there are some foundational challenges that the current strategy brings up that I've been thinking a lot about recently. I share them with you in good faith below :)
1. The first point is that there is a key symbolic and practical difference between focus countries and general support. As Asaf said at Wikimania (my paraphrasing): 'We won't go out of our way to support projects outside of these countries, but will be open to requests for support from anyone elsewhere.' I think the feeling in some countries outside of this scope is that, instead of welcoming their initiatives, they are sometimes met with immediate and pretty vehement opposition. This isn't to say that the WMF isn't supporting those initiatives, it's just that the tone of those conversations is often oppositional and sometimes even aggressive which doesn't bode well for good relationships between the Foundation and community members who, admittedly have a long way to go to developing strong proposals for support, but who need to feel supported and valued if they are to continue doing this work. This makes the 'active focus' so much more of a big deal than it would immediately be apparent: being in an area of active focus often means that the barriers are just much easier to overcome since it is in the WMF's best interests to make things happen there.
2. My second point is that the WMF has chosen to look mostly at active editors at a national level in order to decide on the focus countries, but has added more symbolic reasons in its decision to support Egypt. I totally support the decision to focus on Egypt but I think it points to the need for a systematic approach for choosing what active interventions the Foundation will make. The problem, I think, with the approach of using active editor counts as the primary way of deciding which countries to focus on are as follows:
- Countries are being compared to one another without an understanding of the barriers to participation in different parts of the world. The unintended consequence of this is that it gives the impression by people working in places where it is a major success to get just one more active editor, just one more article about a relevant local topic, rather than scores more that their work isn't valued as highly.
- We often choose a particular way of evaluating where to focus our efforts because of the availability of the data, rather than because it is the best way of understanding a problem. The problem with this is that it can result in us believing that this is the right way of evaluating whether something will be successful when other alternatives (perhaps more difficult) might prove to be more accurate.
- Finally, I was struck that the number of *readers* of Wikipedia aren't taken account in this decision. There is a great paper by Judd Antin and Coye Cheshire called 'Readers are not free riders' [1] that speaks about the importance of reading Wikipedia in becoming a Wikipedian. Active editors shouldn't, I believe, be the only way to think about which communities are most engaged in Wikipedia.
3. All of these issues lead me back to the same question: what is the goal of this programme? And: how will we know when it is successful? Is it about increasing the numbers of active editors in particular countries? Or, is it about trying to actively solve the problem of weak representation of particular subjects and people at the level of geography? I would advocate for the former rather than the latter because increasing numbers cannot be seen as an end in itself. We have the benefit of being a community that doesn't have to be driven by numbers or shareholders or profits. We can think more deeply about the symbolic power of our interventions and about what it means to be successful as a global movement. We're trying to build an encyclopedia in which the sum of all human knowledge is represented. We're only going to do that with the involvement of people around the world. And as people like Mark Graham have shown [2], some of the weakest representation on Wikipedia is of places in sub-Saharan Africa. Understanding why this is a problem *by engaging in projects* in this part of the world seems to me an obvious strategy - but only if this is the type of goal that we're looking towards.
4. What I would advocate for is two things:
a) The first is to establish a strong research agenda that doesn't only assess the success of current projects (for example, the current programme that tracks an editor's edit counts from the moment of a training intervention etc) but to also gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of Wikipedia in the lives of people in places where there may not be a large number of editors. Doing this will enable the WMF to gain a better understanding of how to turn those readers into editors. This needs to happen because the conditions of access to WP is *so different* in some parts of the world that we cannot simply import old understandings of how to generate interest in editing through interventions like the Wikipedia Academies. [I'm going to write a bit more about the value of ethnography in this context on ethnographymatters.net if you are interested]
b) The second is to develop interventions that are not only aimed at gaining more editors but that can make a high impact in the lives of ordinary people around the world. I'm reminded here of a project discussed at the Haifa Wikimania where Wikipedians worked with students in a project to install Wikipedia on computers in Cameroon and that within hours of the installation people from the village were queuing up to read up on medical information. That's the kind of project that I would want to see the WMF 'going out of their way' to initiate and support - in addition to the easier (but never easy!) projects of supporting already-successful editing communities. In doing this, we will be able to learn more deeply about how Wikipedia needs to change as countries in the Global South come online. I know that you don't want to be developing a programme where the Western ways of doing things (i.e. growing Wikipedia) are merely imported wholesale into the Global South. But without a solid understanding of what Wikipedia is and what it can be in places where it is just a seed, this won't happen.
In conclusion, in the words of outgoing chair Kat Walsh, and something reiterated by Abbas Mahmood at Wikimania, 'we (should) be doing the things that are hard and not only the things that are easy.' I look forward to helping wherever I can as you develop the strategy in the months to come :)
best, Heather.
[1] http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~coye/Pubs/ConferenceProceedings/AntinChe...
[2] http://www.zerogeography.net/2009/11/mapping-geographies-of-wikipedia.html