[Wikimedia-l] WMF's New Global South Strategy

[Heather Ford]

Thank you so very much for your reply, Anasuya and Asaf. And sorry you've
been ill :(

Your message was so helpful - thank you for explaining how the decisions
were made, and for writing that you are open to changes in the strategy as
you learn more about this process. That is much appreciated :) I also want
to say that I don't want this to be seen as an attack on the strategy. I
think you have done such great work already, and more importantly, have
been open to learning from your mistakes (as we have as we've gone through
this process with you) at a time when there has been tremendous changes at
the Foundation - all of which I appreciate. I just think that there are
some foundational challenges that the current strategy brings up that I've
been thinking a lot about recently. I share them with you in good faith
below :)

1. The first point is that there is a key symbolic and practical difference
between focus countries and general support. As Asaf said at Wikimania (my
paraphrasing): 'We won't go out of our way to support projects outside of
these countries, but will be open to requests for support from anyone
elsewhere.' I think the feeling in some countries outside of this scope is
that, instead of welcoming their initiatives, they are sometimes met with
immediate and pretty vehement opposition. This isn't to say that the WMF
isn't supporting those initiatives, it's just that the tone of those
conversations is often oppositional and sometimes even aggressive which
doesn't bode well for good relationships between the Foundation and
community members who, admittedly have a long way to go to developing
strong proposals for support, but who need to feel supported and valued if
they are to continue doing this work. This makes the 'active focus' so much
more of a big deal than it would immediately be apparent: being in an area
of active focus often means that the barriers are just much easier to
overcome since it is in the WMF's best interests to make things happen
there.

2. My second point is that the WMF has chosen to look mostly at active
editors at a national level in order to decide on the focus countries, but
has added more symbolic reasons in its decision to support Egypt. I totally
support the decision to focus on Egypt but I think it points to the need
for a systematic approach for choosing what active interventions the
Foundation will make. The problem, I think, with the approach of using
active editor counts as the primary way of deciding which countries to
focus on are as follows:

- Countries are being compared to one another without an understanding of
the barriers to participation in different parts of the world. The
unintended consequence of this is that it gives the impression by people
working in places where it is a major success to get just one more active
editor, just one more article about a relevant local topic, rather than
scores more that their work isn't valued as highly.

- We often choose a particular way of evaluating where to focus our efforts
because of the availability of the data, rather than because it is the best
way of understanding a problem. The problem with this is that it can result
in us believing that this is the right way of evaluating whether something
will be successful when other alternatives (perhaps more difficult) might
prove to be more accurate.

- Finally, I was struck that the number of *readers* of Wikipedia aren't
taken account in this decision. There is a great paper by Judd Antin and
Coye Cheshire called 'Readers are not free riders' [1] that speaks about
the importance of reading Wikipedia in becoming a Wikipedian. Active
editors shouldn't, I believe, be the only way to think about which
communities are most engaged in Wikipedia.

3. All of these issues lead me back to the same question: what is the goal
of this programme? And: how will we know when it is successful? Is it about
increasing the numbers of active editors in particular countries? Or, is it
about trying to actively solve the problem of weak representation of
particular subjects and people at the level of geography? I would advocate
for the former rather than the latter because increasing numbers cannot be
seen as an end in itself. We have the benefit of being a community that
doesn't have to be driven by numbers or shareholders or profits. We can
think more deeply about the symbolic power of our interventions and about
what it means to be successful as a global movement. We're trying to build
an encyclopedia in which the sum of all human knowledge is represented.
We're only going to do that with the involvement of people around the
world. And as people like Mark Graham have shown [2], some of the weakest
representation on Wikipedia is of places in sub-Saharan Africa.
Understanding why this is a problem *by engaging in projects* in this part
of the world seems to me an obvious strategy - but only if this is the type
of goal that we're looking towards.

4. What I would advocate for is two things:

a) The first is to establish a strong research agenda that doesn't only
assess the success of current projects (for example, the current programme
that tracks an editor's edit counts from the moment of a training
intervention etc) but to also gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of
Wikipedia in the lives of people in places where there may not be a large
number of editors. Doing this will enable the WMF to gain a better
understanding of how to turn those readers into editors. This needs to
happen because the conditions of access to WP is *so different* in some
parts of the world that we cannot simply import old understandings of how
to generate interest in editing through interventions like the Wikipedia
Academies. [I'm going to write a bit more about the value of ethnography in
this context on ethnographymatters.net if you are interested]

b) The second is to develop interventions that are not only aimed at
gaining more editors but that can make a high impact in the lives of
ordinary people around the world. I'm reminded here of a project discussed
at the Haifa Wikimania where Wikipedians worked with students in a project
to install Wikipedia on computers in Cameroon and that within hours of the
installation people from the village were queuing up to read up on medical
information. That's the kind of project that I would want to see the WMF
'going out of their way' to initiate and support - in addition to the
easier (but never easy!) projects of supporting already-successful editing
communities. In doing this, we will be able to learn more deeply about how
Wikipedia needs to change as countries in the Global South come online. I
know that you don't want to be developing a programme where the Western
ways of doing things (i.e. growing Wikipedia) are merely imported wholesale
into the Global South. But without a solid understanding of what Wikipedia
is and what it can be in places where it is just a seed, this won't happen.

In conclusion, in the words of outgoing chair Kat Walsh, and something
reiterated by Abbas Mahmood at Wikimania, 'we (should) be doing the things
that are hard and not only the things that are easy.' I look forward to
helping wherever I can as you develop the strategy in the months to come :)

best,
Heather.

[1]
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~coye/Pubs/ConferenceProceedings/AntinCheshire_ReaderFreeRidersCSCW.pdf


[2]
http://www.zerogeography.net/2009/11/mapping-geographies-of-wikipedia.html