[Foundation-l] We have the problem

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:53 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> - Communication between projects are at the positive zero. Yes, there
> are some communication, but it is more than very poor. At the other
> side, I don't see systematic work toward making the communication
> better. Without communication, we have separate projects hosted at WMF
> servers, nothing more.

I care a lot about inter-project communication. (On the other hand, i
love learning foreign languages. Not everybody is like me.)

Recently i started a new page on meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_synchronization

It is an attempt to establish a new culture of discussion about
interwiki links. The response has been surprisingly positive: a lot of
people understood the instructions that i made up out of the blue and
started new discussions.

So, well... communication between projects is not at the absolute
zero, but it is still quite close to that. I can identify several
reasons for low communication between projects:

1. Most people don't know foreign languages well, and even if they do
know them, they mostly write in one of them. They may be unsure about
their spelling abilities and well, not much can be done about that. Or
they are reluctant to interfere in a different community. For example,
i write a lot in Hebrew and English and those two communities are
quite different, but i am able to fit into both. I write comparatively
little in the Russian Wikipedia, even though it is my native language,
because its community is even more different (in the issues of NPOV,
Verifiability and copyright, for example).

2. People may dislike other projects. As i already said above, i
dislike certain aspects of the Russian Wikipedia. Some - definitely
not all - Hebrew Wikipedians strongly dislike the English one, because
they consider it to be "extremely inclusionist" (i disagree, but
that's what they think).

3. Communities like their autonomy: I like the en.wiki policies on
verifiability, notability, templates, userboxes, deletion discussion,
appointing admins, etc.; I find them logical and i wish that all
Wikipedias would adopt them. But some people who dislike certain
aspects of another project may consider it so important that they
would dislike the whole project because of that and wouldn't even want
to hear about its positive sides and learn from them. Hence, a lot of
wheel reinventing happens. So maybe the foundation could try to force
some global policies? Probably not: Since communities like their
autonomy and many editors would retire if policies would be stuck down
their throats.

4. Quite simply, extra boldness is required to look into a new project
after you are already used to one. Many people may often go and visit
their parents or uncles in another town, but rarely visit the neighbor
next door.

-- 
Amir Elisha Aharoni

heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore