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

[Heather Ford]

I'm sorry I'm coming so late to this but I've been thinking about this a
lot and there are two questions that I still have that have been bugging me
that perhaps you might clarify, Asaf.

The first is why South Africa isn't included in the strategy. The more I
think about it, the more I think that it seems like a glaring omission and
so I keep thinking that there is something I'm not considering. If the
Foundation used 'active editing community' as a benchmark, South Africa has
a really strong editing community in Afrikaans Wikipedia as well as a
strong chapter that is interested in extending this success to other local
languages and to broader editing of Wikipedia within the region - a region
that is very poorly represented on WP and would benefit from more
assistance and advice from the Foundation.

The second is your point about research not being at your disposal at the
Foundation. I'm curious about why research isn't part of your strategy. It
seems to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to engage in more
research to understand what kinds of challenges people are facing, what
conditions make a local project successful, and also, about what kinds of
projects are useful in their symbolic effects rather than focusing only on
scale. I know that research capacity at the Foundation might be strained by
there are always opportunities for collaboration with the research
community, as well as incentives for researchers to engage in research that
the Foundation really needs.

Hoping you can shed some light on this!

Thanks!

Best,
Heather.


On 30 August 2013 17:24, Asaf Bartov <abartov at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:51 AM, Anders Wennersten <
> mail at anderswennersten.se> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for sharing this, giving me an insight into an area where I myself
> > have little first-hand experience
> >
> > [..]
>
> > But what about the key issue: What are the parameters that makes a active
> > community to be created and also be sustainable? We have a lot of
> anecdotal
> > stories and a lot of subjective opinions, but have there ever been done a
> > professional study taking an analytical approach, using many different of
> > our communities as input to find the critical parameters that creates
> > success or hampers/disintegrate active communities?
> >
>
> Not to my knowledge.  I explicitly state that this is a tough nut to crack,
> i.e. that we don't yet know how to create that sustained core of
> self-motivated active editors.  It's very much worth studying, but I don't
> have a research department at my disposal.  If and when research brings us
> some proposed solutions (we must not assume in advance that there is
> precisely one way in which such cores come into existence), I'll be first
> in line to listen and learn.  For now, with so much work to be done where
> we _do_ have a core of active editors, we'll focus on working with those.
>
> As stressed in the presentation, while we won't _actively_ try to make
> something happen where there is no active editing community (e.g. Namibia,
> Suriname, Botswana, Afghanistan), we remain open to experimentation with
> _community initiatives_ anywhere in the world, via our grantmaking programs
> as well as any advice, networking, etc. we can extend to support such
> initiatives.
>
>    Asaf
> --
>     Asaf Bartov
>     Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
>
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