[Foundation-l] Fwd: Message to community about community decline

[THURNER rupert]

while i really enjoy the amount and quality of the contributions in
the strategy wiki, one could even imagine different dimensions
influencing the number of contributions:

1. what?
additional content types requires additional contribution. while
wikipedia might be considered "quasi-complete", other projects pretty
sure are not, just to name commons, wikinews, wikiversity (which is
information targetted to people of different age / education in other
words). and if you take wikinews, this one will never be complete :)


2. who?
additional people having access to wikimedia projects will trigger
some of them to contribute. this i find particularly well covered in
the strategy. one aspect would be additionally interesting, related to
the interenet accessibility timeline. in the western world internet
and computer penetration started in the 90ies, and wikipedia started
into a "penetrated world". other social / community sites like
facebook grew bit a little bit afterwards, also blogging. what is the
influence of this, i.e. does somebody who starts to edit wikipedia
_before_ facebook or a personal blog stay longer with wikipedia or
not? what does this mean in, e.g. global south, countries where
internet penetration meets an already existing facebook and
wikipediea?


3. how?
if it is easy / quick to contribute it consumes less time, and one
does it more often. this is basically a technical issue. templates,
syntax, procedures, software. questions like "is mediawiki still the
right software", "can the type of contents we want be nicely edited",
like an interactive course in wikiversity, just to name something
where we have nothing good. i would love if this would get better
coverage in the strategy - maybe even shorter coverage.


4. where?
if we extend the possibility to contribute everywhere, people might
find it easier to take a short time slot to contribute. partially i
feel this is very well covered, especially with the mobile strategy.
providing content creation examples might help in this respect. to
give an example: while travelling one can take geodata, photos, films,
audio recordings, and can store it for later upload.


kr, rupert


On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 22:18, Ting Chen <tchen at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Dear all:
>
> The Wikimedia Board of Trustees just completed its two-day meeting [1]
> this weekend in Berlin. We devoted the longest time to discussing
> declining trends in editing activity and our collective response to it.
> I encourage everyone to review Sue’s March update [2], and the editor
> trends study itself [3]. It is a deeply important topic, and each report
> is only a few pages long.
>
> The Board thinks this is the most significant challenge currently facing
> our movement. We would encourage the whole movement - the communities,
> wikiprojects, Chapters, Board, Foundation staff - to think about ways to
> meet this challenge. We know many contributors care about this and have
> worked on outreach and hospitality in past years. We are considering how
> we can help make such work more effective, and ask for suggestions from
> the community to this problem now and to invite discussion and
> suggestions [4].
>
> Greetings,
> Ting
>
> [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/March_25-26
> [2] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/March_2011_Update
> [3] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study
> [4] http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:March_2011_Update
>
> --
> Ting Chen
> Member of the Board of Trustees
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
> E-Mail: tchen at wikimedia.org
>
>
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