[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Status of Wikimedia

[Jimmy Wales]

Elian has written something very powerful and important, and I want to
quote some from it to echo the sentiments.

> Wikimedia has accomplished great things: An encyclopedia, written by
> common people and volunteers, slowly getting better and better, to the
> point of being a serious alternative to classical encyclopedias. There
> are its established sister projects, slowly evolving and becoming useful
> (btw, the category:philosophy on commons is a mess).
> 
> But to maintain and improve this standard of quality requires constant
> work and attention. New contributors have to be welcomed and taught the
> "way of the wiki", policy proposals which would result in deteriorating
> the quality have to be turned down, conflicts between good authors have
> to be mediated and last but not least over 3 million articles in over
> 150 languages need to be checked for vandalism and are waiting to be
> improved and still a lot more are waiting to be written.

Bravo!

> I went back to the real thing, the encyclopedia in my language - which
> is nor Bavarian, neither Münchnerisch although I am from this region and
> city but german, a language almost everybody in Germany speaks and is
> able to understand (except he's maybe turkish or serbian or arabic).
> There's still a lot of work to do even if some newspapers rate us
> already as better than brockhaus.
> 
> Tell me when you've stopped discussing and voting on genial new projects
> and obscure dialects, when you've kicked the language fanatics from the
> mailing lists, when you've closed the unwatched spam traps, when you've
> settled on a checkuser and logo policy, when someone has had the guts to
> introduce single login instead of just talking about it and when you are
> serious about this human knowledge thing.

I'm very sympathetic to all these points.  I don't have an easy answer
to what to do, and kicking language fanatics off the mailing lists isn't
exactly our normal style.  I do think we need some serious reform of our
language policy to end what I see as an ongoing drive to reclassify
every dialect in the world into a standalone language.  I do think we
need to be much more severe about closing down unwatched spam traps.

And so on...

Each person's list of things like this will be slightly different, but
the overall point is that I am beginning to sense a need with the
community for us to turn inward, to change some of our very open
policies which lead people to endless new-project proposals and
new-language speculation.

--Jimbo