[Foundation-l] We have the problem

[Milos Rancic]

Hm. From time to time I live in illusion that I may point to some
problem and that someone else would be willing to solve it. To be
honest, I wrote the initial email with such intention :) as well as I
didn't expect that much of reaction. And I think that it is really
great that at least 'meta' community is interested in this issue.

There are two kinds of comments in the thread: one kind is related to
the particular issues (inside of my email and related to the solutions
of particular problems), the other is related to the general ones.
This mail is about the particular issues. I'll try to summarize the
global issues in the next mail, probably tomorrow.

== About some of my arguments ==

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:24 PM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:
> Actually, the number of edits per year is irrelevant: if the article is
> being written, it gets a huge number of edits, but when it is almost
> completed, only numbers have to be updated, and I do not see any problem
> about it.

Yes, it may be true. Separately from this issue, I was discussing
tonight with one my friend, a cognitive psychologist, who said to me
that this (lesser number of edits) is (one of) the most important
signs that one article came into the 'stable phase'.

Besides that I would like to see some statistics about activity around
France-as-the-state related articles, there is one more important
issues which may contribute to the decline of the number of editors;
this time a very natural one, but still a problem for us:

If editors treat some article as 'completed', 'stable', or whatever,
they are less motivated to see that article again. If some of them
come into the position that 'they finished the job at Wikipedia',
again, we have less editors.

It produces the same problem which is, generally, our most important
worry: What is the ratio of number of articles per editor.

This shows one more systematic problem. While some systematic problems
may be solved 'just' with more organization because their origin is
inside of very predictable specter of social relations, there are
other problems, not so predictable, not so obvious -- about which we
need to take care.

At this point I may just have fantasies about making such kind of
analysis which are not a product of coincidence: I told something
which is not so important, you pointed that and I realized one other
issue here right now.

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:23 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
> You have to consider, Milos, that these very real problems you identify may
> not be amenable to a global solution.

There is one important issue which I missed to emphasize. I haven't
listed the problems which we should solve after which we would be
fine. I've listed the problems which are produced by the systematic
problem, which may be worded as 'we don't care a lot'. The part of
that systematic problem from the past -- we didn't care a lot --
brought us to the situation where we are not able to list our
functional problems.

So, I don't think that we have to start to work on particular problems
(if they are not urgent). We have to start to work on the systematic
problem.

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 6:48 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> However, I am a bit perplex that you built your whole argument around
> the ability of these two chapters and the apparent inability of the
> others. I am not saying all chapters are a success, but in your
> statement, you succeeded to both alienate yourself several chapters, and
> fail to convince me due to a flawed argument.

Thanks to pointing that :)

As I said, I don't think that any of mentioned issues are problems of
particular groups. In this case, it is not a problem with chapters, it
is not a problem with ChapCom, it is not a problem with the Board.
Everybody gives the best of themselves in that process (creating of
chapter and functioning of chapter).

But, I realized, for example, that Wikimedia Serbia and future
Wikimedia Croatia are really happy entities because they had luck that
I knew the right persons in Belgrade and Zagreb and that I shared
those informations with them. Chapters from a lot of countries don't
have their places for their gatherings.

And, chapter members are not responsible for that. They are just
volunteers who are willing to make a chapter. ChapCom has very limited
human resources and it is not its responsibility to make local
connections. Board, for sure, doesn't have a time to deal with every
chapter. So, problem exists, no one is responsible for saying how to
make something at the field, chapter members are not business persons
who are able to find whatever their chapter needs... And we've got a
systematic problem: there is a problem, no one is particularly
responsible, everybody are responsible as a whole (at least, I don't
see a responsible entity out of those inside of the process) and,
finally, no one is solving it.

So, the issue was not related to the ability of chapter members, but
to one kind of systematic problems.

== About some other issues ==

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:
> Foundation-l should be separated split in two: One list for all WMF
> projects and one for the internal issues of the WMF. (I, for one,
> would be interested in the "all projects" emails, and not interested
> in internal WMF issues.) Furthermore,  sending to Foundation-l emails
> that should go Wikipedia-l must be frowned upon, until the senders
> learn what is on topic and what is not. The mixing of all those things
> often makes me want to unsubscribe from them all.

Maybe it is good to change an approach of separating lists. This one
was and is used for community issues. The community is much bigger
than WMF, so it may be good to move WMF list to, let's say
wmf-l at lists.wikimedia.org and leave this list for the community.
(Note: If anyone wants to discuss about this issue, let them separate
the thread.)

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 7:57 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> I suspect at this time the best chance of increasing interwiki
> communication is through wikimedia commons as it is one of the few
> things all projects have a stake and interest in.

Yes, it may be a good starting point. Some time ago, there were a
discussion about moving all images to Commons (including fair use
ones) or some sister project ('non-free.wikimedia.org'), while some
people strictly opposed that. Having *all* images at some common place
means that people will have to cooperate about this particular (but,
important if no project has a repository) issue.