I'm sorry I'm coming so late to this but I've been thinking about this a lot and there are two questions that I still have that have been bugging me that perhaps you might clarify, Asaf.
The first is why South Africa isn't included in the strategy. The more I think about it, the more I think that it seems like a glaring omission and so I keep thinking that there is something I'm not considering. If the Foundation used 'active editing community' as a benchmark, South Africa has a really strong editing community in Afrikaans Wikipedia as well as a strong chapter that is interested in extending this success to other local languages and to broader editing of Wikipedia within the region - a region that is very poorly represented on WP and would benefit from more assistance and advice from the Foundation.
The second is your point about research not being at your disposal at the Foundation. I'm curious about why research isn't part of your strategy. It seems to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to engage in more research to understand what kinds of challenges people are facing, what conditions make a local project successful, and also, about what kinds of projects are useful in their symbolic effects rather than focusing only on scale. I know that research capacity at the Foundation might be strained by there are always opportunities for collaboration with the research community, as well as incentives for researchers to engage in research that the Foundation really needs.
Hoping you can shed some light on this!
Thanks!
Best, Heather.
On 30 August 2013 17:24, Asaf Bartov abartov@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:
Thanks for sharing this, giving me an insight into an area where I myself have little first-hand experience
[..]
But what about the key issue: What are the parameters that makes a active community to be created and also be sustainable? We have a lot of
anecdotal
stories and a lot of subjective opinions, but have there ever been done a professional study taking an analytical approach, using many different of our communities as input to find the critical parameters that creates success or hampers/disintegrate active communities?
Not to my knowledge. I explicitly state that this is a tough nut to crack, i.e. that we don't yet know how to create that sustained core of self-motivated active editors. It's very much worth studying, but I don't have a research department at my disposal. If and when research brings us some proposed solutions (we must not assume in advance that there is precisely one way in which such cores come into existence), I'll be first in line to listen and learn. For now, with so much work to be done where we _do_ have a core of active editors, we'll focus on working with those.
As stressed in the presentation, while we won't _actively_ try to make something happen where there is no active editing community (e.g. Namibia, Suriname, Botswana, Afghanistan), we remain open to experimentation with _community initiatives_ anywhere in the world, via our grantmaking programs as well as any advice, networking, etc. we can extend to support such initiatives.
Asaf
Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! https://donate.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe