[Foundation-l] VC - alternative resolution

[Milos Rancic]

I suppose that you are coming from a project with in a bigger language
(English or German), which is visible not only by a lot of people who
are talking in other languages, but by an audience of 100M+ (native
and second language) speakers with a good Internet infrastructure.

There is a huge difference between a highly visible project with a
well developed community and a project visible to, let's say, 30M of
speakers from which only 10 are potentially interested in
participation.

We are approaching our human resources limits. There are a number of
projects which reached its contemporary maximums and their further
development is closely related to the development of high technology
and its adoption.

A very good example are Slovenian projects. It is a highly developed
country with 2 millions of inhabitants, which approximates the number
of speakers of Slovenian (at the most, there are 3-5 millions of
speakers all over the world). Slovenian Wikipedia is well developed.
Maybe the project still has the best speakers/articles ratio out of
conlangs (at least, they had it a year or two ago). More people on
Slovenian Wikipedia is now related only to better adoption of the
Internet, not to the Internet accessibility. In brief, the best path
which one set of language projects (which covers around 2 millions of
speakers) may pass is the Slovenian path.

Slovenian Wikipedia is, also, a good Wikipedia. They have less
Wikipedian problems than a number of projects which languages are
based in the same area.

However, they have their own problems (as I heard that some much
bigger projects have their own, similar problems). Some of their
contributors are talking about their problems, but there are some
limits of where and how you may criticize your own project. I am very
well introduced in those limits. If you are even a close to those
limits, the community around the project will be hostile toward you.
Talking directly about those problems at the public list is the best
way how to pass those limits. Talking at non-public list is a good way
how to <irony>test the limits</irony>.

According to the present situation, the only other option is not to
talk at all (except in private conversations).

One of the most important jobs of VC, as I see, will be to support
such people. Usually, support shouldn't be a "support by the
authority". It should be support by analyzing problems (maybe even not
public) and finding a possible ways how to solve them. Usually, a
public support from "the global community" is valuable enough to solve
a problem inside of one community.

However, deep problems exist all over the Wikimedian projects, too.
Some community may be deeply POV or even worst. And of course that we
won't get an ask to solve POV on some project by POV pushers. And we
need a mechanism how to heal such project and such community. Of
course, it shouldn't be by using oppressive methods. We need to find a
way how to do that at as less painful as possible method, if not
painful at all.

But, before we are able to think about solving problems, we have to
find a tool how to find them. And for finding problems we need to have
someone who would think about that. It is not a task for Meta ArbCom.
It is a task for a dedicated group of volunteers, possibly one of the
working groups of VC.

And, by the way, I was talking not only about the problems from
outsider's perspective. There are a lot of simple or complex problems
of the local communities which are not solved only because there is no
a body which job is to listen those problems. I listed some of them:
You need an interwiki bot? -- Make it! -- even it is a routine task
for a number of bot owners. You want to take care about actuality of
the data inside of articles about countries? -- Do it alone! -- even
it is much more efficient to have one bot for all projects who is
doing that. You want to compile a course from de.wv and en.wv sources?
-- No, you can't do that, they are using different licenses. You want
to connect Spanish, Russian and Dutch biologists who are working on
Wikimedian projects? -- No, you can't do that because there is no a
method for doing so. Or -- do it, no one is stopping you! -- Any help?
-- Help? We don't have such institution.

I am not saying that we should take base our work around cases like
Russian Wikibooks or Moldovan Wikipedia are. However, as the Board is
the final instance for all real-life and real-time issues, we need the
final instance for community and content related issues. Yes, there
are a lot of ordinary jobs to do and VC's tasks will be full of those
types of jobs. But, if we are not making a general purpose body, then
it is better to think about a number of working groups which would
address particular issues. Making a body which would address
all-but-some community/content problems seems to me as making new
problems.

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 11:45 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>  --- Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > VC shouldn't be responsible only for developing
>  > policies, but for
>  > their implementation, too. If VC is not able to find
>  > a way how to
>  > implement one policy, then that policy is useless.
>  > And the main job of
>  > VC is to address communities/content problems. So,
>  > (one of) the first
>  > thing(s) which it should address is to handle
>  > no-ones-jobs; which
>  > means to find a way how to implement the solution
>  > for that problem.
>  >
>
>  This is where I am feeling disagreement with you.  You
>  say "the main job of VC is to address
>  communities/content problems", but you all the
>  examples you have given have been things that could be
>  described as "outsider's problems".  By which I mean
>  an outsider has a problem with Siberian WP, or and
>  outsider feels X.WP is not implementing NPOV
>  correctly.  I have never seen a community come to this
>  list and ask for help on the sort of problems you
>  describe.  And they do come here with other sorts of
>  problems. I am not saying that the problem's you
>  describe do not exist or that they are unimportant.
>  But they are extraordinary problems that we should not
>  be basing a large permanant organization around.
>  Extreme cases are not the greatest need.  However
>  slowly you feel these cases were addressed; they were
>  addressed.  That cannot be said about the more common
>  problems faced by communities.
>
>  I would much prefer an organization that is built
>  around the mundane problems and is able to empower the
>  communities to implement good policies by giving them
>  boundaries within which to work out their own
>  solutions. A group that would put together and
>  translate a copyright FAQ would be fulfill a need ten
>  times greater than one going around examining, and
>  when neccesary implementing changes for, all the
>  Wikipedias NPOV policies.  Implementing policies is
>  not scalable no matter how large the VC ends up being.
>  And such an effort will only stifle the ability of
>  individual communities to come up with creative
>  methods that may be shared back across other
>  communities if successful.
>
>  I think everything Ec has been saying  lately has my
>  strong agreement and I am glad to see he is part of
>  this group.  Not just because of that, as we often
>  disagree on other topics. But because he does not seem
>  to be spread as thinly as the some of the other
>  members with prior commitments. I must admit I prefer
>  Nathan's alternative resolution. I like cautious
>  approaches best. There is a reason that no Council has
>  ever been created despite years of discussion. The
>  reason is not because of a lack of ambition to
>  actually do it so much as to a more widespread fear of
>  the ambitious.  Caution in creating this Council will
>  do a great deal to allievate those fears.
>
>  Birgitte SB
>
>
>
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