[Foundation-l] [EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week

[Erik Moeller]

On 11/20/07, Christiano Moreschi <moreschiwikiman at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
> This vulgar monstrosity got my blood boiling. Who the hell thought this one up?
> Clearly, not someone who spends half their day fighting in the dirty,
> blood-bespattered trenches of the never-ending Wikipedia-wars.

I always appreciate a good rant. :-) But I disagree with you. The
point of broadening participation is exactly to increase quality and
to reduce systemic bias of content authored by a predominantly white,
young, male, nerdy community.

That said -- of course any growth of our community needs to be
managed. And while the stable versions project may look like it's
frozen, it's not: the demo site linked from quality.wikimedia.org has
resulted in a lot of feedback, additional work has gone into vetting
the extension for security and scalability issues, and only the
necessary work on fundraiser-related tech issues is pushing the date
for deployment and further testing a bit.

With two full-time developers, any strategic high priority project is
difficult to execute. That's part of the reason we need to grow the
organization, and we need all the help we can get in developing
fundraising and revenue strategies that will allow us to do so. (That
said, if you are an open source developer, nothing is stopping you
from contributing to the code directly -- I will gladly point you to
the right places to do so.)

IMO the natural evolution of Wikipedia will be such that there will be
a growing separation between "collaboration spaces" and "reading
spaces" -- both require different social norms and different
technologies. We won't abandon the principle of massive global
collaboration to increase the usefulness of our content: that would be
insane. Both tracks are equally important: quality _and_
participation. And one, ultimately, depends on the other.

-- 
Toward Peace, Love & Progress:
Erik

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