[Foundation-l] Options for community organization

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 7:38 PM, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
>
>  > - For those who are interested in organizing community, I think
>  >   that the best way is to self-organize themselves and start to
>  >   work on sensible proposals.
>
>  A trade union can organize a strike, a church community can
>  organize to build a church, a political party can win an election
>  and a guerilla can cause a revolution.  The Wikimedia Foundation
>  has organized fundraisers and keep the servers running, with some
>  paid staff.  The chapters have organized various exhibitions and
>  information outreach events and a running toolserver.  But what is
>  "the community" supposed to organize?  What difference in the
>  world is this kind of organization supposed to achieve?

In posts related to (P)VC I listed a number of problems with which no
one of Wikimedia bodies are dealing. Some people listed other problems
with similar amount of groups which are dealing with them. I am really
tired of repeating them and you may take a look at foundation-l
archive from April this year or so. And I have one more...

A couple of months ago I made a program which is making daily
statistics for Wikinews [1]. Today I finished the next generation of
the program, which is making daily statistics for all WM projects [2]
(and may be used for any other MW based project) and it will be in
function in the next day or two. This is some kind of benign, somewhat
useful thing for all of us. It isn't a big deal to put it, it isn't
something for which I will urge, it is interesting to some of
contributors and it may be useful.

As I am somewhat active at en.wn, I passed through a really
frustrating process of getting bot flag for that purpose because of
one person who opposed that. People from pl.wn were welcomed that; as
a sole contributor to sr.wn for the most of time, it was the first
place where I implemented that; I asked people from de.wn at IRC, but
I had to fill some form or so (something which is not only a request
for bot flag), so it was too much for me (as I said, bot doesn't do
anything very important); I asked people from it.wn at their bot
request page, but as I didn't see any conclusion in a two or three
weeks (only one supporting vote), I forgot for that.

BTW, I gave up from regular asking for localization and updating it
because I realized that I don't have any appropriate tool for that.
Finding some way for making a good localization process will be my
next task for that bot.

Wikinews has projects in 20 languages and there are ~700 more projects
for the full version. I will not ask every project particularly for
that. (I'll just ask wn communities for changing the process and,
maybe, a couple of other projects in which I am somehow involved.) It
is not because I am frustrated or so, but because I needed a month for
dealing with 5 projects. If we have just 500 active enough projects, I
would need 100 months for dealing with all projects, which is
something more than 8 years. No, thanks.

At the other hand, Wikipedian interwikis are much more important and
people with interwiki bots have to pass ~250 times bot approval
process. And, sometimes, even very well known persons, like Andre
Engels is, are not getting a bot flag at some projects, as well as
their bots are being blocked because of that -- which usually may
destroy a lot of time spent on working for the common goals.

>  > - At the other side, communities should start with
>  >   self-organizing their inter-project cooperation at the lower
>  >   scale
>
>  Individuals and small groups are already participating in more
>  than one project, be it Wikipedia+Wikisource, multiple languages
>  of Wikipedia, or even Wikipedia+Wikitravel+OpenStreetMap which
>  reaches outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. They're already
>  talking on each other's IRC channels, mailing lists, village
>  pumps, exchanging interwiki links and ideas.

Yes, i know for some of the collaborations and I am happy to see them.
However, such collaborations are rare and we have much more basic
problems than, for example, WP-WT-OSM collaboration aims to cover
(but, as I said, I think that such projects are useful).

>  Some things that individuals can't easily do is organizing local
>  events of a certain size.  That's what we have chapters for.
>
>
>  > I would like to make a group for initiating self-organizing of
>  > inter-project coordination.
>
>  How does this need
>  any further "organization"?  Why should people need to contact
>  you, when they can just start doing these things?  It's as easy as
>  editing Wikipedia.
>
> ...
>
>  Pardon?  Why do you make it sound as if all you want is to get the
>  role of a bureaucrat, no matter what needs to be done?  Can you
>  point to some problems that need to be fixed, instead of just
>  pointing to yourself as a solution for a non-existing problem?

It seems that you didn't read carefully enough what did I say. I
explicitly said that groups in which I am participating shouldn't be
the only groups for particular purposes. You are free to organize your
own group. I would like, for example, to see the revival of
Wiki[mp]edia Scandinavia idea.

My work is public. I am agreeing for non-public work (let's say, a
private mailing list) only if people with whom I am working have
strong concerns against working publicly. And initiating cooperation
between projects is not something which should be done privately.

* * *

I would like to know what do you have against self-organization of Wikimedians?

[1] - http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Statistics
[2] - http://sr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B5