[Wikimedia-l] conversations between WMF and non-English projects

[phoebe ayers]

On Sun, Jul 29, 2012 at 12:30 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo)
<nemowiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> Amir E. Aharoni, 29/07/2012 20:27:
>
>> In the 2012-13 WMF plan document I saw an interesting thing:
>> "We’ve hosted key community stakeholders such as English Wikipedia’s
>> ArbCom and Portuguese Wikipedia’s top contributors, in an effort to
>> better understand and respond to issues they're facing." (page 41).
>>
>> I was very happy to read this. In general, I hope that such focused
>> meetings will be held with more language communities. I don't think
>> that I need to explain why :)
>
>
> I'm not sure I like the idea of "key community stakeholders", but I agree.
> The following passage is interesting as well, in fact I had forwarded it to
> WikiIT-l already:
>
> «In response, in 2012-13 we intend to invest in more thoroughly
> understanding the non-en-WP communities, and growing our social and
> political capital. To that end, we will build a team of three community
> advocates inside the Legal and Community Advocacy department, with the goal
> of better understanding the non-English language communities, particularly
> German, Japanese, Spanish, Russian, French and Italian.
> We will also recruit an additional 5-10 experienced community members as
> short-term WMF fellows.»
>
> Nemo

Yes! This is part of an interesting and difficult long-term problem
that I think we are all familiar with -- how to capture common views
and concerns from a set of diverse communities, especially when no one
person is responsible for being a "representative" of any particular
community -- and, for the WMF, how to support all of the projects (not
just some of them!). While the little tangent about the annual plan in
this thread is, I think, overly hostile and pedantic -- many, many
items are condensed and summarized in the annual plan, believe me --
the point that no one individual or group can speak for any particular
wiki, and that we should always be careful about being accurate about
this, is certainly true.

But, that said, trying to figure out representative project concerns
from a wide swath of projects, summarizing them, and then doing
something about it is absolutely needed. I think there is very much a
need and desire from everyone involved with, for instance, building
software or helping with community support to make sure the end result
works for and supports all of the projects in all languages and is not
biased towards one language or wiki culture. This is (as Oliver notes)
one of our grand challenges as a community and movement -- an
unsolved, difficult and crucial problem.

I'm not sure if in the long term focusing on specific language
communities and recruiting fellows is the sustainable answer for the
WMF -- actually I'm pretty sure it isn't -- but I also don't think it
can hurt to try and build a deep (and as Amir notes cross-project
translated) analysis of how different communities work, and this work
will provide the basis for thinking about project comparisons. This is
one of the deep gaps in the current Wikipedia research, too, and I'd
love to see either the WMF or the research community (or both) do some
deeper work into analyzing classes of projects as well as individual
projects -- do very small Wikipedias share a set of needs? What about
medium-sized ones? Do Asian-language projects share concerns or
similar community structures? etc etc.

And, I would love to see us build a stronger structure for
transmitting community concerns up to the WMF/chapters/developers/etc,
and vice versa: we should work on rebuilding the embassy and
ambassador network, creating translation and interwiki portals for
small languages on those projects, and so on.

best,
phoebe


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