Hi, Berto.
You're right that Meta isn't a place for most people to communicate; how could a 'deeper introspection' be carried out? The idea of simply attracting more people there is interesting; and doesn't require yet another focal point.
The absence of articles can be powerful; you can tell a lot about a community by what it describes, and what it doesn't write about.
Yes we do miss self-awareness, basically one can tell where we are going to only once we already got there, based on pure evidence. But are we sure that by becoming more aware of ourselves it would be any better? I mean... lots of societies (just think of Italy, since I'm a citizen there I'll quote that to avoid offending other cultures) simply ignore any rule. Laws are written everyday and they all are blatantly ignored by the population, lawmakers included. It sounds like hell, yet a number of people go there each every year and the place managed to build up a number of great cities. Is wikipedia an anarchistic-oriented latin society? Isn't the community simply "doing it" and refusing to spend time in discussions while they can "do it themselves their own way"? Most signals would suggest that this is what users really do. So yes, we do need to plan and be aware of what we do, but from the other hand... aren't we risking to damage our own wondertoy?
I wonder if we really refuse to spend time in discussions. There are many places to discuss things (sometimes just procrastinating work on the projects) but one rarely has a clear position on priorities or large-picture timelines when these matters come up. The community includes many great essay-writers... but when a few people write down their long-term plans, there is nowhere to put it. We lack a critical mass of interest to curate these ideas into something reusable. I don't know what will disrupt the current wonder, if anything. But there are some slow not-wonderful changes that could be improved upon.
So okay, we need a better marketing. We need to enroll people wishing to "go meta". Where from?
- the editions
- the virtual streets
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So possibly the only sensible answer is: get more contributors. Let's see... 200k contributors make (let's be optimistic) 2k meta-involved people. Where do we get some 100k contributors from, to enlarge the META-base?
Half of the answer is being better about engaging other languages, which are largely absent on Meta. Designing better multilingual patches, error messages, portals (Commons does a better job)... another half is to link explicitly to Meta from the projects as a place for a certain kind of discussion [right now you have to look for a while to know it exists]
Last but not least... what will we do once a growing number of people who aren't speaking english at all will want to have a say in such decisions?
A related question. Develop a more active or explicit class of language-bridge contributors, and a simple way to say "I need language assistance"?
--SJ
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On 9/22/06, Berto albertoserra@ukr.net wrote:
Hi!
It is a shame that introspection, statistics about our communities and ourselves, internal research efforts, have not been a larger part of recent years' growth.
It is. But maybe here one of the pillars (no original research) is at least partly responsible. Formally we cannot publish research on ourselves until someone else does not publish it somewhere else first. Yes we have META for this, but how many people go there? I suppose that a deeper introspection will have to be encouraged somehow.
that spending too much time discussing or thinking about priorities and future direction is a distraction from building the projects or writing an encyclopedia.
It's an understandable position. Yet once you have over 1 million articles publihed maybe it's time to look for more than just horizontal growth.
The long-term discussion about planning for, devotion to, and passing on the message and goals of the projects falls to all of us -- not ... also those who care enough to donate money or critical rants or expert advice, readers who would not dare contribute to an encyclopedia but have relevant experiences in other areas of life to add to planning discussions, and the friends and colleagues and family of the above, interested enough to participate in such discussions if they knew about them but not yet aware they exist.[2]
Yes. Can't sell a thing unless you market it. Being a top-20 site may help, yes we do get money and human resources anyway, but the real question is: how much more we could get and are not getting?
those who feel broad-based discussions are criminal, or wastes of time:
Are invited to join the discussion and to prove their point :)))) If you come and cannot prove your point by discussing it, then it really is just a waste of time, so... help us prove OUR point to prove that you are right :) Neat, isn't it? :))))))))))))))))
Are we dominated by people with no full-time jobs and no children?
A new Middle Age? Clerics are an option, really. I can personally enroll in the no children part, at least so far. I suppose this research should include another determinant topic: what are the main interests of the community, i.e., what are we writing about? Maybe the absence of a wide amount of child-related articles might mean a lot... I personally noticed astounding grey areas as much as food is concerned... are we mostly eating in MacDonald's? I'm serious. Wikipedia content does have an impact on the kind of contributors we are attracting. 99% of us got to know the wiki because we found information on it by googling around. Eventually we ended up in the wiki so frequently that we started to use it. If information on a given subject is poor or lacking we may simply miss to attract the consumers of such an information segment. Do we need to subside strategic information segments to enlarge our user base?
we could have a simple projects-wide survey completed within a month. Let's make this a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to optimize future iterations.
Any start is better than nothing.
ps - while looking for the link to the user survey on meta, I ran across this: a poll applet that seems to be working as of last month. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll
how can we localize it and put it in the local editions?
Wikipedians speculate about the future all the time. And yet I say we rarely engage serious discussion of priorities, dreams, timelines, goals, and opportunity costs. Why is this?
Because we all love to chat, and this is a pretty casual approach to problems. Making a decision takes time, and people often end up in making it in closed circles of friends, instead of bringing the whole thing to public, where it would be drawned in endless chatting and no decision at all. The very capability of making decisions is one of the weakest points in the wmf. Or maybe it is its best strenght? I would think twice before saying loud that it's one of the two. As it is, the monster seems to have no head, things just happen in the most chaotic fashion ever, yet they keep happening.
Yes we do miss self-awareness, basically one can tell where we are going to only once we already got there, based on pure evidence. But are we sure that by becoming more aware of ourselves it would be any better? I mean... lots of societies (just think of Italy, since I'm a citizen there I'll quote that to avoid offending other cultures) simply ignore any rule. Laws are written everyday and they all are blatantly ignored by the population, lawmakers included. It sounds like hell, yet a number of people go there each every year and the place managed to build up a number of great cities. Is wikipedia an anarchistic-oriented latin society? Isn't the community simply "doing it" and refusing to spend time in discussions while they can "do it themselves their own way"? Most signals would suggest that this is what users really do. So yes, we do need to plan and be aware of what we do, but from the other hand... aren't we risking to damage our own wondertoy?
The problem is that we need to do both. We need a central administration to get funds, to invest them and to make sure it's not 200k users all spending their nights to make the very same template, but... we also have the problem the users are not paid, so they are free. Free for wmf to use them, and free for them to do whatever they wish. It's really a complex equilibrium we are dealing with. How binding may a decision be, if made by a minority? Obviously it is binding, to a certain extent. A project can be closed, another can be funded, and by this very fact the flow of human resources gets canalized. Having a wider discussion would mean that the opinion of low level contributors may become more relevant to what this "technical elites" decide. Only...
Only there is currently no barrier (let alone being able to speak decent english) for anyone to join such "elites". Anyone wishing to do so is absolutely welcome. Actually is more problems waiting to be solved than volunteers wishing to undertake community work. So we have no "feudal barrier" in wmf. IMHO, we cannot expect this to undego any substantial change. People are NOT interested in WMF as such. A small minority of users is interested into becaming a contributor, and an even smaller percent is interested into wmf as such. Mostly it's people being not too young and having a hip for "politics" (in the social, non-ideological sense of the word). When you say that meta has 2k active contributors it looks small... but how many would be left in the count, if you took off all those enrolling just to fight pro or against a single language? Not many, I'm afraid.
So okay, we need a better marketing. We need to enroll people wishing to "go meta". Where from?
- the editions
- the virtual streets
If we get these people from the editions, a lot of their time is going to be lost for the edition(s) itself. So we engage into an internal competition for human resources. Not nice. Okay, but if we get them from outside the communities... than making the strategies will be in the hands of people who do not even know what an interwiki link looks like. Will the community accept such decision-makers? I for one would not. So possibly the only sensible answer is: get more contributors. Let's see... 200k contributors make (let's be optimistic) 2k meta-involved people. Where do we get some 100k contributors from, to enlarge the META-base?
Last but not least... what will we do once a growing number of people who aren't speaking english at all will want to have a say in such decisions? If we only push them all into national chapters and say "learn to speak properly if you want make yourself a career" all we do is making grounds for a number of de facto secessions... Honestly this last detail is worrying me much more than anything else. And no, I have no idea whatsoever of how the problem can be addressed. But it must be addressed, unless we want that 1/100 factor of "meta involvement" drop to 10 or 100 times less.
These comparisons *should* be made.
Yes. absolutely right.
Unfortunately, these discussions tend to peter out and get lost. Mailing list threads are dropped and never wikified
The problem is that it's hard to wikify a discussion. I'd publish an "essay" on Meta, but what if I want to answer like this? Wikimedia is a wonderful piece of software, but it makes a poor forum. I can wikify what you published, I'll try and wikify the relevant parts of my answer, but... I have the recurrent feeling that one of the reasons why we miss a wider discussion is simply because it's hard to discuss on a wiki.
Do you know someone who works at a multinational volunteer collective?
Myself. The Dutch Barge Association is organizing the 2009 Black Sea Rally (from Ireland to Kiev and back by internal waterways and seas). It's very complicated, as it means crossing the Bielorussian border on private boats, and passing 200m away from Chernobyl. For the organization we use... a closed wiki. Over 200 stubs were needed just to map small needs like gas connectors, diesel availability, etc.
Find out what they think the parallels are between their organizations or projects and ours.
- DBA has an external goal. Wiki is a means to us. Here the means coincide
with the end. 2) DBA has but 1400 members (some 800 barges, I believe), a clear internal hyerarchical structure, periodical mass meetings, a paper magazine. Internet is very important to us, but we mostly do our stuff on real water and meet in real life. The whole structure was born as a traditional english "user group" in the 90's, when a growing number of englishmen started to buy old dutch Tjalken and Luxemotors for them to cruise on european inland waters. 3) Projects are largely born much in the way they are born here. If anyone has enough political ability to collect support for a project, than it will eventually become an official thing. 4) While we do actively lobby whenever european laws come to touch our interests, the only funding we request goes to canal dredging and lock-gates maintainance. DBS is fully funded by the 50 quids we pay each every year to get our memberships. 5) The community is keeping a constant eye on whatever happens, I can hardly think of something like META for us. Our village is too small to have unknown districts. 6) We do have minorities (sailing barges). Yes, I'm into minorities even there :) Must be something in my DNA :) 7) Vandalizing pages is potentially dangerous for the life of our members (all it takes is moving navigational data), so we do not accept anonymous contributions. If you are not a member you need a member to grant for you in order to be accepted. 8) There has been a long discussion before accepting to use a wiki for the project. Many people rated wmf as "too chaotic" for them to accept anything coming from here. Yet now consensus is that the wiki is useful, and IMHO it really is. I forced the decision by setting up the wiki myself and emitting the first users. Once it stopped to be a concept and it became "simply a tool" all doubts vanished. I expect another major cruising association to adopt a closed wiki in the next future.
B�rto
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