Dear Nada, excellent framing. It is entirely in our control to fix outreach, build welcoming and forgiving environments, make strides with less-resource languages and communities.
Christophe, thanks again for persisting in this thread (and planning a range of activities around Wikimania!) I see many people engaged with these topics who don't want to engage in discussion about angst over current problems, but are deeply enthusiastic about, and actively engaged in, building new things / working on new possibilities.
Brooke writes:
Wikimedia is a participatory system... We have to put in the work
ourselves.
Absolutely. The civilized netizen's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco anything truly important from scratch.
Galder writes:
One correction: I'm not a trustee!
But we surely trust you, including to make the world's best Txikipedia.
We have many good ideas and talented people in the community. We do need persistent spaces to discuss and make plans, in part because in the last growth spurt we fragmented communication channels across hundreds of pages, sites, lists, and apps. Recombining many of those streams would be good for coherence and continuity.
But our wikis are better suited to experimenting, reverting, and iterating than distilling large-scale consensus. Quick decisions by ~sortition (or by the first few people to turn up) help polish the roughest edges. Having spaces that push back against the iron law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy of oligarchy and preserve freedom to experiment is essential, even when simultaneously waiting for delayed consensus.
Our strongest shared identity is as people committed to building freely-licensed knowledge together, in every language, accessible to the entire world. More people care about this today than ever before. We simply have to make space for it again.
𝐖♡, SJ