[Foundation-l] Making Wikimedia Commons less frightening

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 10:03 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Lars Aronsson wrote:
>> Finn Rindahl wrote
>>> If there was more active admins, we could have done our job
>>> better - especially when it comes to take the necessary time to
>>> communicate with the other users who need help. The only way as
>>> I see it to actually get volunteers to work at Commons is to
>>> build a "community feeling" at commons like in other projects.
>>>
>> You need a community feeling among admins, so they can learn to
>> know and trust each other and collaborate against individual
>> admins who abuse their rights (which surely will happen
>> occasionally).  And you need to foster a community feeling between
>> admins and regular/occasional/beginner users.  But I doubt that
>> the latter is possible.  If it fails, I wouldn't blame you.
>>
> Trust is the key to success in any of these projects.  Presumably the
> current admins on Commons have built that trust among themselves, but to
> the extent of being a closed community,   Aspiring to join a closed
> community requires a person to comply with the norms and standards of
> that closed community until it is satisfied that the supplicant is fully
> compliant.  This strongly discourages any kind of innovative behaviour
> or individuality, and protects the received wisdom of the controllers.
>

Trust is indeed the key. But that trust needs to come from from both
sides. I agree that Commons should work into getting more trusted by
other projects, but it certainly should also work the other way
around, other projects should at least try to get trusted by Commons.
Every once in a while users from other projects come by claiming
"What? Why do you follow the law of XYZ country? That is ridiculous,
we should boycot Commons!" That is certainly not helpful in building
trust. (exaggerated and not specifically pointed at anybody)

I wrote a lot of messages ago that it was all about language. Perhaps
it's not, but it's more about culture and misunderstandings. Some
people do not understand that the rules on their own project are not
universal. Then they get warnings or their images are deleted, and
they get hostile at Commons admins, and Commons admins get hostile at
them and eventually we end up in the current we-versus-them situation.

Perhaps we should step back from making comments like "I try to avoid
Commons at much as possible" and "Your kind of people is exactly what
we don't need on Commons". We don't need this story to become a self
fulfilling prophecy, if it hasn't happened already.


Bryan