Hi Shiju,
I agree Wiki editing and Wiki advocacy are two different things. Even for the Global
Wikimedia Foundation not all advisers and promoters are active wiki editors. But both
these kind of people should have been introduced to each other, have good faith and act in
total sync.
Regarding Tamil Wiki case, this fraud guy hasn't made a single edit in Ta wiki. Not
sure if he has a user account and he never passed any information to the community of what
he was doing in the name of Tamil wiki. This is unacceptable.
As you noted, we are also carefully watching active interest regarding wiki from various
corners. Reasons to watch:
1. To protect from vested interests. Many have their own selfishness, agenda.
2. To ensure organic growth and evolution of Wikis.
If some NPO / Govt is going to donate 1 lakh articles to our wikis, it hears so sweet. But
the reality it is so hard to ensure wiki standards, formats, prinicples if so many
articles come at a single time from people who don't understand what is wiki. Slow and
steady can be better sometimes.
Wikipedia is not just the number of articles, funds etc., Any sort of
good contribution can only come from who understands the nature and
spirit of Wiki philosophy. The increase in articles and active wikipedians should follow a
similar growth rate to ensure the usefulness of wiki. I strongly believe wiki is driven by
the philosophy and contributors who adhere to it.
Hi Yellow Monkey,
For diplomatic reasons I can't name the man in public. Many of the Indic Wikipedians
are aware of the issue and may share the name privately during meetups. The point is World
has enough conmans and we should be prepared :)
Hi Srikanth,
Wiki / open source has a very different working culture from all projects in earth :)
people have difficulty understanding it. People are so used to work under some big leader,
many small leaders :) Wiki is as much a cultural revolution as a knowledge revolution.
Hi Jyothis,
Yes, a Wikimedia subpage will be good to document contact persons across all Indic
Wikipedias.
Regarding the mechanism for election in Tamil Wikipedia:
Considering the urgency of the situation, we just proposed a initial set of 12 long
serving wikipedians (including non-sysops) across different states and countries. And they
were all elected unanimously with a single election until this year end. Among them 5 have
been given the responsibility to conduct talks with Govt if needed.
Later, we will draft formal procedures and qualifications for this responsibility like we
do for sysop elections. We also plan to rotate the responsibilities among us and include
all who are genuinely interested.
Ravi