On Sun, 4 Nov 2012 14:38:29 -0500, Peter Ekman wrote:
I'm pretty encouraged by the several responses to my "different" proposal, in particular Basvb and Lodewijk (below) My proposal in brief - move toward a platform/permanent organization that supports multiple contests on multiple topics at different times of year, with less stress on bigness and more on retaining contributors.
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We supply the experience and expertise. Tools and basic standards. They supply enthusiasm, manpower.
More later.
Pete User:Smallbones
Actually, to me there is no contradiction between proposals, of, say, Peter and Lowewijk (to take two extremes).
It looks like there is a contradiction if we think about the top-down approach. Then, of course, we are a small group of individuals, with pretty diverse interests, and if we try to accomplish a broad variety of goals like trying to organize at the same time WLM and also a photo contest on rivers and may be an article contest on ballet and also to provide at least one photo of every village on the Earth - we will certainly fail.
But I was thinking more about a bottom-up approach. We are good, let define this as building up a mechanism on characterizing cultural heritage. We have some instruments for it. We have more and more people who are interested in the same issues and learn that we have an organization - and they come and get assistance. Take Indian cultural heritage - what did we have a year ago and what we have now? (And, yes, I am also populating the lists, and the lists on English Wikipedia are still waiting for about 5000 photographs to be placed). And I think we should have more than just an organizing committee. (Note that I do not propose a year-round submission of photographs for the contest - I think the contest is doing fine). Indeed, Andorra has completed all of their monuments last year, and the Netherlands has a chance to complete them next year - at least if we do not include the provincial monuments. But then, for instance, are we interested in translating Dutch lists into English and placing them into English Wikipedia? Are we interested in translating Indian lists into Dutch? Are we interested in having more articles? I think there is certainly room for organized activity, and, indeed, cleanup is a part of it. As I mentioned earlier (answering Lodewijk) I would be interested in setting such portal.
But now, back to the bottom-up scheme: If we have a working portal like this, interacting with wikiprojects in different languages, and if there are similar portals specializing on different topics - these portals inevitably would have to talk to each other, and interact in some way, eventually building the Meta-community. There is an interesting thread on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Requests_for_comment/Global_bans#Wikimed... where we discuss why despite the fact that important decision should be taken on meta it is impossible to take any decision, almost all votes end in no consensus. An Jc37, who started the thread, explains that actually there is no coherent meta community. And actually having this bottom-up system of meta-projects would be a way of building up such community - finally, after 12 years of our existence.
Cheers Yaroslav