For the love of Wiki God, may I request all the global people to stop experiementing with India?
People from outside have no clue of India. And the people they hire in India have no clue of the Wikimedia movement.
Ultimately, it has become like few blind people describing an elephant.
Heck,
all the community members know it is an elephant and know it takes time
to grow an elephant. The growth of an elephant can only be on par with
the ecosystem within which it is present.
No amount of systematic intervention is going to change a donkey into an elephant.
I
am tired of seeing experiments being done in naive and tiny Indic
communities and the "lessons learnt" being implemented in Brazil, Egypt
and Arab world. Be it Google or be it WMF or its avatars.
May I request that you do your experiments elsewhere for a change and implement things that work for sure in India organically?
The reason why English Wikipedia community flourishes in India, Tamil / Bengali / Malayalam communities do well relatively are complete socio economic and political. No amount of intervention is going to change this in other parts of the country. This is like providing rice bags to the poor of the third world without fixing their primary socio political issues.
Wikipedia doesn't exist in isolation in a web ecosystem. It is the culmination of scholarly activity of highest order that you can imagine. When languages that are official languages of states and countries, have two decades long web presence, have a thriving local print / visual media and academic network have a problem growing their Wikipedias, I can't understand what the h*ll is being done in Wikipedias that are not even out of incubators, Wikipedias that don't even have a writing system in order.
Few years back Google dumped paid translated articles done with the aid machine translation tools in many Indic language communities and sermoned us that these will bring us a community. Now, WMF's programs are sermoning us that their attempt at seeding communities will bring articles for us. I am 100% sure that both approaches are futile.
I really miss the once thriving Indian Wiki community that organized the world's biggest Wiki conference.
I really miss the spirit of the Wiki community getting replaced by confusions brought because of top-down paid interventions.
The only hope I have is that at least few mature communities will take stock of the situation, stay autonomous and self-sustaining as they were and continue to enjoy the pleasure of Wiki activity instead of getting drowned in numbers, goals, targets and dream targets.
Ravi