So some guy has proved that Facebook is growing faster than the web - at least, in the USA, why would anyone care about anywhere else? - so long as you ignore the bits of the web that are growing like mobile and video. Profound insight this isn't. Chris

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 16:03, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: That is funny, I like statistics. Like, how can you compare a virtually contentless and worthless (in the sense of future-proofness) social network to a content carrying service network? Obviously they can. I mean, Facebook grows slower than bacteria in the Amasonas rain forests, I'm sure they're very worried about that. And the amount of snowflakes in the Arctic, it's much more than the number of FB profile pictures. Worrying. (I cannot just come up anything on facebook providing any value after a few hours it's been posted. Even "likes" for a business are of questionnable value, to put it in the mildest tone.) But I understand your long standing, almost traditional worry about Wikipedia's future. ;-) Peter ps: my 2 'cents.

Facebook, and Twitter, big with Black folk, gives people something they can relate to. Wikipedia is as dry as reading, or writing, an encyclopedia. In a sense they ate our lunch, but millions of Facebook-like user pages can hardly be justified as a basis for charitable donations. Fred

On 26 June 2011 17:46, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net> wrote: It's important to keep in mind that Facebook and Wikipedia have very different user structures. Facebook has one group: individual users chatting to their friends. There are some commercial entities doing stuff too, but the vast majority of users are just people chatting. Wikipedia, on the other hand, has too groups: readers and editors. There isn't a clear line between the two, but there is definitely a difference between readers and editors. That makes a very big difference when looking at these kind of statistics. Facebook just needs to look at how much people are using the site. We need to look at both how much people are editing and how much people are reading.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: That's an interesting theory. Wikipedia is sort of the epitome of a social enterprise, and all of the good and the bad in the project can be traced to its social nature. Trying to make it more like a "social network" can only be interpreted as making it more like some other social network, perhaps by integrating purely social mechanisms a la Facebook. Of course, that could either help or hinder, with no way to know for sure in advance; perhaps encouraging more social interaction would exacerbate and personalize the disputes and conflicts that drive people away.

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 4:15 PM, Peter Gervai <grinapo(a)gmail.com> wrote: +1 As you mentioned earlier, Peter, most things on Facebook are in-the-moment and do last in any sort of repository of things people want to read for educational value. There is some entertainment value in places like lamebook.com, but that humor generally isn't above the brow (there is some witty banter, though). Our talk pages, on the other hand, provide insight in the archives on how the social dynamics shaped the creation of a product as well as provide general institutional knowledge. Wikimedia social networking features such as talk pages, mailing lists, and IRC channels produce millions of lines of collaborative work. This is what makes our system valuable. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

Hoi, I have read the replies that are against social networking functionality. In my opinion you are all missing the point. Our projects are crowd sourced projects and we do not support collaboration, we do not support special projects. We need to. Social networking in our context will not be a Facebook, a Twitter or an IRC. It will have the parts that we need and it will support our activities. Thanks, GerardM http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2011/06/in-defence-of-social-networks.h… On 27 June 2011 18:24, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 28 June 2011 08:35, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yeah! Special projects with a narrower focus would be great, how about giving them a catchy name like "WikiProjects". Maybe we could give every article a "talk page" for users to collaborate on. Heck, let's go mad and give users their own talk pages too! Now if only there was some protocol for real time chats we could use... I'm all for improving the interface around these things, but exactly what functionality are you asking for that we don't already have? Pete / the wub

want to be in the focus of attraction, and too many are doing politics instead of writing an encyclopaedia. Cheers Yaroslav

It looks like we understand the potential risks of adding social features, but I don't know that the merits have sunk in. ==Don't call it a Social Network, don't think of it as a revolution== Th first thing to do is banish the word "Social Network" from the discussion. "Social Network" evokes "Myspace and Facebook", which aren't exactly popular around here, a sentiment I share. When we talk about adding social features to Wikimedia, you must delete all your preconceptions about what a 'social network' is, and break it down into the most fundamental concept-- socializing on a network. Nobody here wants us to just become 'another' Facebook, shudder at the thought. We want to learn from social networks and keep the usable bits-- we don't want to literally become one. If that sound scary, remember changes around here are either optional or gradual or both-- never dramatic, unforeseen, controversial, and imposed. We wouldn't just make a facebook host on Wikimedia Instead, we'd start by little tiny things-- Extension:Wikilove on prototype's a great example. We saw a feature of social networks that WAS consistent with our values-- the per-user "thumbs up". We wouldn't just feed that global social space straight into en.wp, we'd put it on incubator and probably start off with very boring projects like "Copy your home-project user page here and we'll help you translate it". Rules might eventually loosen, but a good starting point would be 'the kind of content projects routinely allow in user space or meta space"-- but in one single unified space, the logical extension to the single unified login. The point is, 'social features' on existing projects would be slow, gradual, with lots of talking, lots of debate, and maybe a couple referendums thrown in for good measure. We're not going to devolve overnight from our current status literally, "The most useful single collection of information on the planet" to merely a useless "innane personal trivial" overnight. We're easing into a slightly more social outlook, we aren't having a revolution or anything :) . We're mining other successful internet projects for the lessons we can learn from their-- we aren't out to blindly copy them and abandon our own mission. Terms like "A Facebook for Wikipedia" communicate an important idea in very few characters-- but it also brings a lot of misconceptions too. And we really do need these need these semi-social features. We have important work ahead of us, and we absolutely do need to increase our intercommunication/socialization abilities if we're going to do our best at that job. And it will NOT make us Facebook or Myspace. == Socializing is essential to intelligently running a Global Foundation== The community is a part of the leadership of the foundation. The community contributed in a billion ways throughout the year, but elections especially require the global community to come together intelligently make very important decisions. To help run a foundation, we need to be able to talk to each other. talk to each other, and we need to understand each others values, not just their votes, not even just their direct rationales-- we have to understand each others values. I have to intelligent collaborate with people without knowing _anything_ about their culture, their values, or their traditions. I know what my projects' missions are, but I don't automatically presume to know what their projects' purposes are just because the sign on the door says "Wikipedia". If you ask me to make a global decision, one of the first things I want to know is what editors of other projects and other languages believe. There are changes I feel comfortable supporting for my own home project, but I wouldn't want to 'impose' as a global policy unless I can hear from the people being affected. Right now, there's no permanent venue for that kind of discussion. We can't really form policy with a community that can't communicate with itself. Having a semi-social space where everyone's in the same place, can use the same templates, can see the same user pages, etc-- that alone would be good. ==Socializing promotes high-quality, NPOV articles== If I am editing the English language biography of a historical Arabic-language subject, I want to be able to communicate with the Arabic-language users and enlist their help understanding whatever it is I need help with. When I see articles on wars fought by English-speaking nations against non-English-speaking nations, I always wonder what the "other side's" article's look like, but machine translation only goes so far. Right now, it's hard for bilingual editors of corresponding articles to ever get to share notes unless the idea occurs to them on their own-- socializing would help promote the idea that cross-language collaboration is a good thing. "Spanish-American War", you should talk to the editors of the corresponding article on es! Here's a list of a some users who were recently online who speak en and es-- and here's a button to send them the top few a message asking for their advice. ==Socializing promotes innovation== Small projects are more nimble-- EnWP is now the most popular encyclopedia on the planet, it has the most users and the most global users. In contrast, DE is the second largest, but just that little extra bit of freedom has given them a lot of innovative advantageous. How many times have we heard a statement of the form "There's this awesome feature/extension/tool/policy being tried by DeWP, may EnWP should take a look at it." Just that little extra bit of freedom-- the weight of the world isn't only De's shoulders in the same way, and that freedom lets them 'out innovate' EnWP in some cases. This is a well-known effect that has long been predicted-- the more people dependent on project as it is, the harder it is to change that project. Our innovations often come from the small projects, where small groups of people can have the freedom to try new things without degrading the experience for existing users. Socializing helps promote 'cross-project pollination' of good ideas. Sometimes those ideas will be technical innovations, sometimes those will be cultural innovations, sometimes just vague intuitions. Best of all, sometimes the discussions will be two people putting half an idea together and collaborative discovering a new idea that neither could have discovered without cross-project socializing. == Socializing helps us learn about other communities' needs== New members in new regions of the world will bring their own needs very different from mine. If I'm going to intelligently make decisions affecting the global community, I need to MEET the global community-- or the best approximation possible at this point in human history. On some occasions, the global community has to come together as a global community to make a single decision-- a policy that will affect all languages alike. In these cases, it's not enough to know _my_ project's values-- the most intelligent decisions will be reached by voters who consider everyone's values, not just their own. Right now I know a few things about the values of Arabic language speakers, and I can research the values of Arabic language nations. I could look up religions across the Arabic-language and cross-reference that with the available data on the values of that religion. I could do a lot of things like that, but none of them are actually relevant. But there are no statistics to be found on the unique values of that very special subpopulation of Arabic language editors who are also Wikimedia editors-- and we can't just assume they're 'typical of their country or their religion'-- my experience is that Wikimedia editors are a tribe unto themselves that radically transcends differences of language or culture. ==Socializing promotes translation== You're editing an article that involves a nation / language / community you're unfamiliar with. Other communities have large groups of people who know about the subject and could help you with your article. If only it were easier for you to communicate with bilingual speakers who have that knowledge. IF I want to ask a question of "Arabic language users of Commons and its projects", I don't speak Arabic, it's fairly tricky to communicate with them-- figure out how to get there, look up the lang code, change the url or notice the sidebar, As it is, if I want to send a message from one-language to one language, I have do a lot of work. I have to look up the language code if I don't know it, I have to figure out how to get there (remember how many people _still_ can't handle manually typing in a url), I have to find the appropriate venue, which isn't standardized across projects, I have to leave a message, and then i have to hope someone show up to notice the message who also speaks my language. That is a big barrier, and an unneeded one. If I want to communicate from one project to all projects, it seems to be impossible, as a community member, to do that. We need to build a space where that action is absolutely one-click trivial, not arduous. We could use copy bots, but creating a global semi-social space is infinitely easier. A pre-existing global semi-social space would have been so useful in the elections-- There were a lot of people who appeared to be 'qualified' candidates, but since they spoke a wide variety of languages, I couldn't communicate with people on their home projects to get endorsements from their fellow editors. A social space would lower the barriers-- if "I" active in a global social space, it would have been very different-- "I" might not know someone who knows the candidate, but chances are I'll have worked with someone who speaks the same language as the candidate, and thus I can have a channel to enlist cross-language. ==Socializing is good for morale and participation== People like friends. People like being part of communities. This aspect can never ever 'eclipse' the main focus on the movement and its mission, but a little socialization, now and then, is a good thing. For some editors, it's easier to start off with a nice neutral conversation about the weather, rather than jumping straight into an edit war. ==Socializing is educational #1-- Socializing as a Wikitext Tutorial== Wikitext has gotten pretty intense over the years as our templating skills have grown, I bet it must be kinda impenetrable to a novice. Learning new technology and new rules and reviewing the existing debate, making mistakes, feeling confused, and sometimes not getting a nice response to your early contributions-- this is an identified problem. Socializing, or some other 'low stress, low conflict' space would be a useful tutorial to have a meaningful sandbox experience in a place devoid of a need for rigid editorial control of the sort our encyclopedia articles have to have. ==Socializing is educational #2-- Socializing itself IS educational, I promise!!== Somewhere along the line, western society came up with the funny idea that socializing is 'wasted time', idle and pointless recreational chatter. Some claim this is a vestige of a patriarchal past where socializing was seen as female idle banter and thus 'uneducational'. I tend to think the problem goes back to Descartes, who was very big on the idea that "intelligence" was inherently 'rational not emotional, explicit not intuitive'. Regardless of its origin, our 'canonical educational experience' involves sharing objectively verifiable facts. Wikisource and Commons, on the other hand, education through less-explicit methods-- art, music, media, fiction, and poetry. People for nearly a century have been finding some great but intangible meaning in the Robert Frost's verse "I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference". What are people learning from this? I don't know, and I can't put it into words-- but clearly, poetry and art DO educate in ways that are very difficult for outsiders to quantify or comprehend. Socializing is, in fact, educational. Humans are wired to do it, we're doing it for a reason, we're mean to socialize, and people who are socializing are actively educating themselves about human psychology and human dynamics. Indeed, the #1 concerned raised about homeschoolers is that the students will miss out on the socializing aspect of the educational experience. Psychologist and neuroscientists have studied minds and brains extensively-- and socializing is DEFINITELY learning, it's definitely educational, and people definitely need a certain amount of it. I can't tell you exactly what all they're learning when they socialize-- but we know the behavior is important and it's educational and it continues throughout adulthood. Socializing is 100% "in scope"-- global multilingual socialization is 150% in scope. Fostering global communication is essential to our mission to share knowledge-- socializing is part of our "great mission". It may not be a top priority right now, but never let it be said that socializing is just wasted brain cycles-- it's not. It's important-- not just because it will make us more efficient but also because it is, in fact, a goal unto itself, though admittedly a relatively low-priority goal. I too don't want our socializing outreach to 'unbalance' our system in any way-- but the benefits keep stacking up, and Fred keeps making very thought-provoking points. I sense a sort of critical mass forming where it makes sense to start experimenting in this direction. ==The final point: What do you at Wikimania before and after the lectures?== Do you go to Wikimania or one of the other many such meetups? Do you travel a long distance to get there, do you spend lots of resources, time and money, to attend? If you still have doubts about the value of increased socializing for our community, notice what people do whenever there is a break, or whenever people arrive early or hang out together afterwards. They are 'socializing'... And in the end, it's that the whole point of Wikimania? So that our very best minds can get together for formal face to face conversations, but also for informal socialization and community formation? In all the meetups and conferences we hold, how often do productive conversations happen around a restaurant table or a cafe or a hotel suite or wherever? How many social interaction of the form "What are your interests, here are mine" have led to productive collaboration? We know socializing is both education and productive to our projects. We hold elaborate events because those social benefits are so great. All we have to do is to help the global community have the same kinds of social experiences that Wikimaniacs enjoy, or our best approximation to them. The only trick is-- socializing has to be a secondary priority-- if people are coming here literally just to socialize and truly not to edit or discuss the issues, then that would a problem. But to be honest, Facebook's so good for pure socialization, I don't think we could get the 'non-wikimedian' audience to use our socialization feature unless we really really really consciously work a 'facebook killer'-- and THAT truly isn't us. Alec "The Manifesto King" Conroy

Well, respectfully I disagree, Gerard, on your view, or analysis of the stats. Edit is used vague on our community: from writing a FA almost alone to doing a WiiGnome task. We need both, but those two activities require not a same amount of communication skills as well involvement to wiki editing commuity lives. We have a certain number of people who edit several languages. I edit English Wikiquote and Japanese (even most of those edits are on talks or project name spaces). I know some translators who edit several languages - but I'm not sure we assure every those "multilingual" editors edit main namespace of each projects mainly. I was honored to be called Aphaia on all wikis once by a certain editor who visited #wikipedia.ja, but it didn't mean I was then active as writer of articles - rather it may have meant I created interlang links aggressively. So I'd like to ask in which way we keep and assure our community as multilingual? Honestly I have been thinking this for years seriously. Even on meta, it was not once I was accused just because I left a note in Japanese - when I had a hardship to express my opinion enough in English. I remember still how I was accused then - I was accused because I didn't write in English "the language everyone can read". How then can such a community multilingual? Or in other words, what have we been doing for making our community multilingual? We have devout translators - and always I thank them and feel honored to collaborate with them, but, or because I have been working with them, I feel we need more other ways to assure and empower multilingual aspects of our Wikimedia community. Cheers, On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 3:37 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- KIZU Naoko / 木津尚子 member of Wikimedians in Kansai / 関西ウィキメディアユーザ会 http://kansai.wikimedia.jp

I think people should be more flexible in their postings. It is OK to write a message in Japanese and also in not quite perfect, or even rather poor English. Send both. And if there is no English just use Japanese, even on this list. We can all go to Google translate and see more or less what it says. The world is moving simultaneously in two directions: English as lingua franca and towards mulilingualism. I have no real hope of learning Japanese, but if someone is young and spending a lot of time on a multilingual site they are going to learn other languages naturally. People can be very fluent in their native language. There is no reason they should not use it and say exactly what they mean. Fred