[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Theo10011]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Lodewijk <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org>wrote:

> Am 13. September 2011 13:34 schrieb Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com>:
> <snip>
>
> >
> > The biggest strength that a Wikinews like project can always have, is the
> > most diverse contributor base anywhere. We have contributors from so many
> > countries, they all know how to contribute, they speak a hundred
> languages
> > and have access to things a news/wire service will never have. Wikinews
> was
> > never able to capitalize on this.
> >
> > Theo
> >
> >
> Do we really have such a diverse base? I agree that Wikimedia is quite
> diverse - although even Wikipedia is made up of way too many intellectual
> white men (or rather, too few elderly people, women, people from the
> 'global
> south', people who did not have a university degree or are getting one etc
> etc etc) - even Wikipedia is quite biased in its community. And then we're
> only talking about the English language - you can imagine that the Dutch
> language projects have relatively many people living in... (no kidding) the
> Netherlands. We are not perfectly diverse, but we do have the potential to
> be very diverse indeed. On some aspects we might be *relatively* diverse,
> but on many others we're not.


You seem to have misunderstood my point. The diverse base is the number of
communities we have, not a mix of it. There are homogeneous language groups
and communities, I never disputed that but there are so many of them. It has
something to do with sociology, why certain type of individuals or groups
gravitate towards certain things. I think you know, but others might not, I
am from the Global south. There is something different that attracted me
towards the projects. It is and was open for me to join, as I am sure it was
for anyone in my part of the world, the difference is, you can not go and
get people to care and recruit just for the sake of having diversity. This
in no way means the projects are not diverse, there are projects in both my
native tongues, I merely chose enwp.

For example, can you tell me how many similar Dutch language projects exist
similar to ours? in Netherlands? and from those, who work side-by-side by
French, German, Swahili or Hindi? I can make a call to translate and have
any message translated in 2 dozen languages within a day. In order to do
that, they have to have knowledge of multiple languages and how to edit.
These groups exist, there are volunteers in those languages willing to
contribute their time for nothing in return, we just can't tap it well
enough.

The case of English Wikipedia only echoes what the Dutch projects might
have. It *is* the language of old, white intellectuals, all the history of
the world reaffirms this notion, most anthropology looked at the world from
this perspective and in doing so, negated its own neutrality.

I beg to differ, we most certainly are diverse. You are just looking at a
single project or language and trying to find diversity in it, I am saying
look at the bigger picture and all the languages. English might be the most
widely spoken language and that is why you even have as much diversity as we
do now, compared to several other Romance languages you'd find even less
diversity in the contributor base, its simply a matter of a larger
contributor base. Maybe not on this list or the English Wikipedia as much as
we'd like to be, but there are dozens of mailing lists and projects in other
language, we are discussing this issue on just one of them.

Theo