On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: [snip] Ryan, I believe your post was unnecessarily confrontational. I would expect you to call me out on that kind of thing, so I'm going to call you out on it. I generally succeed at being thick skinned— but this characterization of my words is hurtful and the witch hunts that sometimes accompany responses like yours are outright frightening. I'm also concerned for other contributors who aren't as online-tough as I am... I know people who wouldn't touch a gender-issues thread with a 10ft poll because they are sure that they'll be misunderstood and burned alive. We can't improve diversity if we create the impression that anyone who disagrees with the group or shares a contrary view is "the enemy" and fair game for an attack. We should welcome contrary views, even wrong ones, and treat all speakers with patience, respect, and a healthy-helping of assume-good-faith— even when, and especially when, our first impression of their positions is that they are ones which might be harmful to some group or another. After all, by ferreting out a wrong position and building a good counter argument in a respectful discussion between colleges we build knowledge and skills that help us see and correct the same wrongness everywhere. But that can't happen if we use language to address wrong positions that reflect negatively on the character of the speaker. ... and to get real change on these kinds of pervasive issues we need the broadest input and the broadest buy in. This can't be achieved if the topic is one which people feel is open only to people who know the right things to say and the right ways to say them. The characterization of my mainstreaming suggestion as "dumb-down Wikipedia enough to attract women" is exceptionally uncharitable and contributed significantly to my impression that you were trying to make a target out of me. Just so there is no lack of clarity on this point, I'm opposed to "dumbing down" in general and the idea that anything would need to be made _dumb_ to attract Women is completely unsupported by any information that I've seen. Making things more attractive to typical people doesn't mean making them dumber. ... In this case I wasn't even disagreeing with anyone. I'd take your complaint, if not the tone, as a deserved response if I'd dismissed any examples similar to the ones you provided in your post... but I simply didn't. I fully agree that there are "real cultural issues", and that they should be addressed. (Though I would point out, the author of that first horrifying diff-link has long since left the project, so I'm at a loss as to what action I could take now to deal with that particular case). Any time you can point to clear articulatable problems, I'm all for taking action. Once you've taken care of them, however, it's also important the you keep in mind that some of the imbalances are caused by external factors or indirect non-discriminatory internal ones. By keeping all possible causes in mind, and by maintaining a friendly and positive environment for collaboration, we have the greatest opportunity to get the most benefit in the shortest amount of time. I apologise for giving you— or anyone else— the impression that my post was intended to reflect negatively on Women. That was certainly not my intention. In fact, what I was saying arguably the converse (and I used a fairly derogatory language to characterize what Wikipedia selection bias that I'd like to see us temper somewhat, "uber-obsessive techobibilo walking-fact-machines", something which sounds more like a side show exhibit than a human being). I believe Wikipedia's form and practices select for weirdos in many different ways, — some weird in 'good ways', many of then negative weirdnesses, (and, I'm sure many more neutral ones). Some of those selections conspired against including Women (and people of many other backgrounds), ... fewer conspire against selecting our existing majority population, because our existing population has done a good job of removing the things that irritate them. ...and it's worth bringing up because it can lead to interesting suggestions, like the idea that making Wikipedia less appealing to weirdos can improve diversity in areas which are not obviously strongly connected to the specific weirdness since selecting for extremes magnifies even small differences between groups. There are plenty of ways that Wikipedia participation rewards being weird— such as having the patience to write a novel defending yourself when someone tries to paint a target on your back... or just having the interest in dealing with an obscure series of commands required to make a wikitext table. By making Wikipedia more mainstream in any area which are not essential to our mission (for example, I wouldn't suggest trying to 'mainstream' our attention to facts) we can expect improvements in diversity (gender or otherwise). This doesn't mean that we shouldn't worry about fixing the existence of bigoted jerkwads on the projects, nor does the existence of jerkwads justify ignoring all other contributing factors. Cheers,

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:15 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Indeed. And you're being too hard on yourself; I don't think you were incoherent, and you're definitely not frequently incoherent. I think Ryan definitely misread your message, and I think he reacted strongly to what he thought he read. And if you had indeed said what he thought you said, I think his response would have been appropriate -- strong in criticizing the substance, but not personal. But, he didn't, so it was fair for you to clarify your words, and it was also fair for you to be sensitive about them. These are sensitive topics and sensitive times, and we should all remember to cut each other some slack as we try to grapple with them. I think a few good things came out of this interchange. I agree with Greg's point that trying to make Wikimedia sites more palatable to non-uber-obsessive technobiblio walking-fact-machines (but still well qualified) types will probably have a greater impact at reducing gender imbalance than targeting improvements at a specific demographic. Removing Wikitext as a barrier may, in and of itself, have a significant impact on editor diversity. I also agree with Phoebe's point. We can't treat this as a one-size-fits-all problem. There may be serious contextual differences across different languages and projects that may require different approaches. We need to be aware of this while also addressing the clear systemic problems. It would indeed be interesting to see what we could learn from id.wp's recent experiences. Which brings me to Ryan's points. There are serious cultural issues that need to be addressed. They may not be systemic -- it's possible, even probable, that there are projects that do not, intentionally or not, create environments hostile to women or other demographics. But when we do see that happen, we need to address it. Speaking as a man who grew up in a household of women and who works a lot in fields that are predominantly female (nonprofits and facilitation), I'd like to claim that I'm especially sensitive to these issues. Sadly, it doesn't really work that way. This stuff is not simple, and environment can exacerbate things. In the strategy project alone, there have been at least two instances where I've been guilty of perpetuating an environment that was less than conducive to women. Last September, when a group of us were brainstorming a list of potential candidates for the Task Force Selection committee, the first list was almost entirely men. This was a natural and harmless result; after all, the vast majority of our volunteers are men. However, I asked the group to think harder to see if we could come up with a group that was 50-50 male-female. I wasn't proposing it as some artificial quota that might reward lesser qualified candidates just because they were women. Despite the gender skew of our volunteers, I didn't think it was unreasonable to identify five great women volunteers. I think we did a good job of this, and I was thrilled by the final makeup of our committee. However, in one of the committee discussions, I once again expressed my hope that we would think a little harder in order to achieve greater diversity in our Task Forces, and I told this story as an example of what I wanted to see. However, I wasn't careful enough with my words, and one of the female committee members interpreted my story to mean that she was only asked to be on the committee because she was a woman. I tried to clarify my words, but the damage had already been done. The second instance was during IRC office hours several months ago. It was late at night (for me), and I'm pretty sure only men were participating -- you can never be sure with IRC. At one point, some locker room humor started. I chuckled to myself, and let it go. I like locker room humor, and when I'm in a room with a bunch of guy friends, I think it's harmless. The problem is, office hours on a publicly logged IRC channel is not the same as my living room. I realized afterward that women who were on the IRC channel or who read the logs afterward would not have found our interchange welcoming. I've been much more diligent about moderating this since, and Philippe's sensitive facilitation has helped immensely, but the tendency has come up again and again. It's not intentional, but it's not right either. This stuff will happen, even if we have the best of intentions. We need to be willing to call each other out when we see it happening, and we need to be firm, yet forgiving in how we educate each other. It's a challenge with diversity as a whole, not just with women, and it's a challenge that we should all embrace. It will make our projects better. =Eugene -- ====================================================================== Eugene Eric Kim ................................ http://xri.net/=eekim Blue Oxen Associates ........................ http://www.blueoxen.com/ ======================================================================

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 1:35 AM, Keegan Peterzell <keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: I should clarify, "a target usage base". -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 12:00 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: As a passive reader of this thread, I'd like to come to both of your defenses. Greg, I don't think anyone was reading your thread with that as the implication. I certainly didn't take it that way, and I don't think Ryan did. He was making a supplemental point of the issue. No big deal, both posts are well thought out and while slightly contrary in nature, have the same end point. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

Ask any librarian about what men and women are reading. Men prefer non fictional, women fictional works. Not all of them, of course, but in large majorities. I doubt that that has no consequences for Wikipedia editing behavior. And, as a women once told to a magazine: Women are too polite to correct someone in public. :-) Kind regards Ziko 2010/6/18 Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: -- Ziko van Dijk Niederlande

Milos, this is really interesting -- thanks for posting it. I'm sorry as usual to top-post and not snip (BB), but I did want to make a tiny point about TED. My understanding is they've been super-successful with translations -- a very large and active transcribing-and-translating-of-talks community has developed for them quite spontaneously, and the TED organization has been trying to figure out how best to support them. (I don't mean to suggest the TED organization has been having difficulties in that regard: my impression is they're thrilled.) I've asked Philippe to take a look at TED's translation community and see if there's anything we can learn from it -- others might want to do the same. Thanks, Sue -----Original Message----- From: Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt; Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 22:21:03 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List&lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] encouraging women's participation Here are my two cents... I am organizing now TEDx event in Belgrade. (Unlike others, our speakers will sign contract for CC-BY-SA, too.) And I am carefully watching gender and age involvement at the Facebook page. Our predispositions were again dominantly male: 5 males and one female in organization. Gender ratio is not better now in organization, while we are trying to make it better. We had disbalance at the beginning, while not so strong as we have in Wikimedia (something like 55:40, with ~5% of users who are not expressing their gender). It is now 48:46 for males. So, by age and gender, dominant groups are: * male 25-34: 25% * female 25-34: 23% * female 18-24: 11% * male 18-24: 9% * male 35-44: 9% * female 35-44: 8% (There are ~400 fans now.) It is interesting that the only constant is 18-24 age group with stable ration 11%:9% for females for months. In all other age groups we have constant raising of female ratio. It should be mentioned that a number of females are willing to participate in organization (but the process of adopting someone is not so fast), which means that it is not just a relation between active and passive involvement. Let's try to compare TEDx event with Wikipedia/Wikimedia: * Both are fancy. * Both are about top achievements of humankind. * Both are about community. Yes, TED treats audience and speakers both as participants. * Wikipedia is more famous than TED. * Age groups are similar. * I don't have any doubt that there is ~50:50 ratio for using Wikipedia, as it is for TED. * TED has much less content, but it has much higher ratio of interesting content per time spent on site. * I am carefully choosing TED talks for Facebook page and we generally have good feedback. However, sometimes I am wrong [1][2] * TED's rule "no political and religious agenda", as well as well defined TED's scope (science, technology, art etc.) saves us from the topics which could potentially produce endless arguing. * Whenever someone has some constructive idea, I am applying it and saying thanks to that person. This makes atmosphere better. * TEDx is not about everyday editing, but about periodical events. However, participation could be treated similarly. Nobody needs to edit Wikipedia every day. * Technical skills needed for participation in TEDx event are much less than those needed for editing Wikimedia projects. * TEDx events are more social. BUT, it is not TED's per se advantage, it is about our leading of Wikimedia communities. We will have regular meetings, probably on weekly basis, out of the main events. * TEDx events and everything around them are much less stressful than editing Wikipedia and trying to find your place inside of one enormous bureaucracy of Wikimedia communities. * TEDx events and communities around them are not mature. We shell see their development. * <for sure something more, it would be good to give a deeper analysis; feel free to give your comparisons> Some conclusions may be: * Creating featured AND interesting content and gather that content on some separate project. "The Best of Wikimedia" or so. But, not, featured encyclopedic article is not *that* interesting, usually. It is not so interesting to read about Belgrade as the feature article on English Wikipedia. Having a featured article on English Wikipedia raises proud of inhabitants of particular area, but it is not interesting. Contrary, I think that we have a lot of interesting materials at Wikimedia projects, which should be just presented nicely. * One ordinary Wikimedian meetup is usually not so fascinating event. Talking about templates, MediaWiki skins, ideas for getting more content at the best (WWII tanks, airplanes and tactics, ass well as about various disputes on projects at the worst) -- is not so interesting for an outsider. We need to find a better way for present ourselves to the world. * I am thinking intensively about the possibility of splitting communities to those which main interests are in politics, religion and being fans of whatever -- and everybody else. Probably, building community would be much easier without partisans. * WP:BITE is something about we are talking a lot, but I don't see any advancement. Just a couple of months ago, I had on my back a classical example of bureaucratic asshole at en.wp. He thought that he knows Wikipedia bureaucracy better than me ha ha ha :D But, I can just imagine the first impression of any newcomer. BTW, I am rarely editing en.wp. Probably, in two major edits I am getting one bureaucratic asshole on my back. * Lower technical knowledge requirements. If WYSIWYG editor is science fiction, maybe a kind of help for structural writing could be helpful: Write in this box title, write in this box introduction, write in that box section title etc. I don't know... * Make social events. They don't need to be connected with Wikimedia projects by idiot-friendly semantics. They could be about much more interesting things. Promotion of science via talks, events, parties should be perfectly fine for our goals. Finding some pop-star to sing for ~50 or ~500 Wikimedians and their friends would be also fine. * Make some auxiliary ways to involve people who don't want to waste time with many Wikipedia jerks. Wikimedia should actively promote license-compatible sites which content can be used on Wikimedia projects. * ... [1] - My assumption was that females would like Jamie Oliver's talk. But, it turned out that it is not the case. After I posted one of his talks, I was talking with a couple of females, who ranked his talk as less interesting than tech-related talks. [2] - In a post-modern society, it is not so welcomed to talk against various pseudosciences. Astrology, homeopathy and similar cults are highly ranked at the fanciness scale. Fortunately, TED is pro-science, which makes to me a field to be a little bit arrogant: If you really care about those things, then TEDx event is not for you. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Дана Saturday 19 June 2010 05:58:31 Milos Rancic написа: Ability to make other editors your "friends", then you could watch their Special:Contributions jointly (see what are your friends editing).

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 7:30 AM, Nikola Smolenski &lt;smolensk(a)eunet.rs&gt; wrote: Then you are using Facebook, not Wikimedia. And Flickr is much better for private photos than Wikimedia. BTW, there is not space for negotiations anymore. Wikimedia will be a social network, too, or it will continue to loose editors.

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 12:40 AM, Nikola Smolenski &lt;smolensk(a)eunet.rs&gt;wrote;wrote: I'm pretty sure my facebook friends don't care what I do for Wikimedia (which is all my info is), they're in it for my awesome status updates. End thread, we are all pro-female editors. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Some ideas to increase the social aspect of Wikipedia: - - insert a small chat with channels for each chapter (for example where the interwiki links were ;) ) - - make a tab for personal comments for articles, where people can express their feelings - - show the last 10 comments on the right side of the article - - soften the notability criterion - - make a reward system for spell correction (automatically attributed by bot unless reverted), for adding references (must be validated by moderator or voted by users) - - associate galleries of sounds and/or photos that you can expand or browse with one click - - create challenges or games for wikipedia: charades pointing to an article to be discovered, collections to be completed (find ten articles with x or y characteristics), create fantasy articles only useful for the game with a warning that it's only RPG, etc. - - allow a friend system and allow to import them from facebook - - develop the homepage of wikipedia and wikinews so that they combine major news with the major updates of the pages we are watching, and more information about your friends - - allow a button "recommend this article to a friend" with feedback from the friend, like a karma count, a thank you count, or the likes etc. On 19/06/2010 08:37, Milos Rancic wrote:

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 7:53 PM, Keegan Peterzell &lt;keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: While I would like to see good articles about every episode of whatever on Wikipedia, this was not the point. The point is to make "personal space" on Wikimedia projects. Adding features to the profile (now: Special:Preferences) will increase number of those who are willing to stay on project. You should be able to turn off those features.

on 6/19/10 4:58 PM, Keegan Peterzell at keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com wrote: <snip>. Yes! Prizes denote direct competition as in sports or, more subtly, with the science & arts awards. Person-to-person affirmation goes a very long way; and is what collaboration & community should be based upon. Give them the climate, and they will give you the culture. Marc Riddell

Sydney, I agree with your thoughts here. But you are talking about activities community members can participate in. I am talking about how those community members interact with each other. Marc on 6/19/10 5:58 PM, Sydney Poore at sydney.poore(a)gmail.com wrote:

One thing we can do would be to make contributors' names more visible. Translators for WMF stuff too (Ting Chen made a good point about the latter in Alexandria). Many websites gives clear credits to contributors - not only for-profit media, but websites whose content is mainly written by volunteers, like Global Online. In TED related translations, their translators' names are on the same webpage of video or transcript, and much visible than in MediaWiki history pages. On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 12:47 AM, Sydney Poore &lt;sydney.poore(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Wikipedia should be kept a neutral repository of knowledge, not a social ground for games. Once you take the path of creating a futile community, there is no way to talk about the long term goals of the WMF, the vision, the ethics, the humanity, the knowledge. You just have people who are here to have fun and to socialize. It would add noise, not signal. Moreover, I think attracting readers is very different from attracting editors. I don't see how it would be positive to convince people to edit articles with superficial reasons in mind. However external sites could use the content for games or comments (like Facebook does). This way, the site originating the "fun attitude" would be distinct from the site about knowledge. Wikipedia would get attention without being invaded. On 19/06/2010 23:58, Sydney Poore wrote:

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 5:23 PM, Noein &lt;pronoein(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'm glad to see that you were being saterical before. I thought you had more sense than that. Attracting consumers is a much more complicated issue than attracting editors. Editors seem to find their niche or go away. Attracting readers takes a constant vigilance over how Wikimedia projects are portrayed in media, pop culture, and casual conversations. There is a fine balance there. The readers part dabbles with the interaction of editors. We want readers to fix typos, clean up things, and monkey about. To make them into editors, they have to have A) the interest B) a positive experience and C) the desire. Desire is different from interest, because that is the compulsion to stick around and I consider this to be the most important part. However, if we can gain at least interest, that is half of the battle even though there are three parts. It is important that we, as the ones with desire, foster the environment to invite the casual reader into at least understanding what we're doing. We all know about the popular misconceptions are about Wikimedia projects, and we are bound to educate and relate to the reader if we want to cause the tipping point of creating an environment that is open, welcoming, but also importantly goal-oriented. This ties into the congruant thread, but I'm avoiding cross-posting. In other words, editors find their own interests and where they fit in. If we are going to encourage *reader* participation, that requires active encouragement from the community to develop a sense of trust. It's true that you can't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. That also applies to print and online sources and what your neighbor tells you the other neighbor did. We have the capacity to actively correct ourselves and each other, which is a medium more powerful than most realize. It's up to us. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Keegan Peterzell &lt;keegan.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: You are missing the point again :) I am not talking about transforming user pages into MySpace pages, but about new layer at all Wikimedia projects, which would stay at the place of Special:Preferences. So, it is about personal space, which rudimentary exists inside of watchlist and similar. It is also about customization. For example, as a registered user, I want to have customized Main Page for myself. Also, those who don't want to use that, they should be able not to use. Treat it as a feature which extends logging in to the site. During the 1990s the most of sites didn't have log in option. The first "social" extension of the log in option was profile. The last are social networking extensions. We've implemented the first one, but we've stopped after it. And time is passing and new projects are passing us with options which aren't treated as the edge of technology or something specific, but as a common part of being on Internet. HAM is exactly something which shouldn't be our model. *Social* (in contrast to technological, military or whatever) impact of HAM community is around zero. Although I am a GNU/Linux admin and although I am including HAM drivers whenever I compile kernel ("just in case..." :) ), the only time -- known to me -- when HAM network had wider social impact was during the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. Nothing before, nothing after. Contrary, our social impact is for a couple of years at the civilization scale and there is no sense to go backward. Besides building the encyclopedia, Wikimedia community has already built cultural movement of unprecedented scale. And present MediaWiki implementation is not enough to support the movement. In other words: Wikimedia is not just Wikipedia. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html As well as dopamine works during the work, not when the prize has been get: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s But, it is just about money and goods, as well as that part of psychology is at the very beginning. Social rewards are much more powerful. (Note that there are many social stigmas because people won't do something for money or goods.) I believe that we would have an editor boom just with "like" button for edits, talk comments and comments [on Wikinews].

On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 1:18 AM, Milos Rancic &lt;millosh(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Watch this, too: http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 19/06/2010 19:53, Keegan Peterzell wrote: Then I made my point. I think futilizing wikipedia is the worst thing we can do. On 19/06/2010 07:30, Nikola Smolenski wrote: ones. RSS feeds connected

On 22 June 2010 00:10, Tim Landscheidt &lt;tim(a)tim-landscheidt.de&gt; wrote: Augmented reality. Wikipedia's coverage of local history and geography benefits if we can get edits from people on the move. Given that 99% of the population is over 6 billion people 1 edit every ten days would result in a lot of worthwhile edits. If wikipedia is to survive it needs to be fun. If wikipedia is going to get a broad coverage it needs to be easy. -- geni

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 4:10 PM, Tim Landscheidt &lt;tim(a)tim-landscheidt.de&gt; wrote: spoken like a true wikipedian :) (are you sure that editing isn't fun, though? I'm pretty sure that if most of us didn't derive at least some joy from it (at some point in our editing careers) we wouldn't be here having this conversation.) I find it helpful to translate the question of whether editing is an inherently elitist activity -- as it may well be -- by thinking of analogies in the sphere of my day job, which is being a librarian in a big university library. To be a librarian -- or even to be a successful grad student or professor -- you have to really, really like to do research. A lot. You have to find true pleasure and satisfaction in chasing down the world's most obscure references or figuring out how to make sense of the literature on some topic. You have to be a total research nerd, in other words. But we cannot do research *for* every single student who wanders through our doors (I serve a school of 30,000 people). We have to help them figure it out how to do it themselves. And there's been a real push in the last 20 years or so to move academic librarianship from the model of the cranky old scholar who might let you touch the books, to the model of teaching "information literacy" -- how to research and evaluate information for yourself. I do a whole lot of teaching, and it can be frustrating to watch student after student work on their papers and do a bad job of their research and their bibliographies, and complain about how it's not easy to do research, when you know that it's possible to do it better. But my job is not to do it all for them: it's also to aid them along the paths of becoming scholars themselves. There's a real temptation to say "research isn't supposed to be easy! It's supposed to be a rite of passage into the academy! Get a backbone, kids!" But I think collectively in the profession we have basically come to the understanding that taking that attitude doesn't make it any easier for non-librarians and non-academics to navigate our crazy, unusable systems -- doesn't make people of any age any more likely to actually do research -- and that maybe, just maybe, if we do enough outreach, and work enough on making our systems easier and better, we'll reach more people overall as well as only the people that are predisposed to become information nerds themselves. I think of Wikipedia the same way. Sure, not everyone wants to or has the ability to edit. And hey, there's a lot to be said for being motivated enough to do it that you learn the systems without any help, becoming a part of the community the way most of us did. But just relying on those mechanisms does restrict our editor base a lot, and saying that only those people willing to jump through many interface and social hoops can join the club is just as unhelpful for our worldwide community of researchers and writers -- and the world of scholarship in general -- as keeping the books chained up in the library was. -- phoebe

I've started page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/How_to_encourage_participation Feel free to add your ideas. If the page with the same idea exists elsewhere -- let's say at Strategy Wiki -- please merge pages and let the list know.

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Eugene Eric Kim &lt;eekim(a)blueoxen.com&gt; wrote: Thanks! This page [1] has the similar scope, actually. [1] - http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Attracting_and_retaining_participants

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Nikola Smolenski &lt;smolensk(a)eunet.rs&gt; wrote: I am not interested in my own edits. They are very boring. I don't have any especial interest in, let's say, Mardetanha's edits at fa.wp as I don't know Persian. However, he is my friend and I am interested in what is going with him. I can inform myself about him at Facebook or at Twitter, but I could do that at Wikimedia, too. Which means that I could spend much more time on Wikimedia and probably to make some fix or a little bigger edit anywhere. Instead, I am just doing my bureaucratic tasks, while I am socializing at some other place. Which gives my content there, not to Wikimedia.

Probably related: http://www.womensenews.org/story/women-in-science/100623/it-jobs-offer-grow…