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Sat Oct 4 14:55:08 UTC 2008


When I am the first person who introduces a Wikimedian with 2 years of
experience (and I didn't do that just once) that this list exists and
that it is the right place for talking about general issues -- I may
conclude that we have a [systematic] communication problem.

If you think about languages as barriers, they are not *so*
significant to become a "real problem". The most of Wikimedians are
able to read English. Also, there is no need that every Wikimedian
knows English, there is a need for just one or few of them per
community.

And "caring enough" may mean different things than just passive involvement:
- Analyzing which communities are under-represented at the common
communication channels (foundation-l, Meta, even English language
Planet Wikimedia)
- Finding interested persons and educate them how to participate in
the global matters.
- Taking care that this process is going well.

Whenever I am able, I am trying to educate Wikimedians how to become
more involved in global matters. The problem about that is that I am
able to have such communication with not so significant number of
them. Every of them is a person and I am a person :) We are making
personal relations and it is not possible to make infinite number of
personal relations; actually, possible number is very low in
comparison with the size of the Wikimedian community.

This means that we need more involved Wikimedians to work on that, as
well as we need to educate "new" Wikimedians to be able to educate
others. This is a hard and long term work, but I don't see better way.
Yes, there are more efficient ways which should be helping tools (at
least, the whole Wikimedia is about education). However, if we don't
know a particular community, if we don't know their problems, we are
not able to tell them the right advice.



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