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

[Abbas Mahmood]

+1 to the questions Heather asked. Especially the South Africa issue.

Abbas.

> Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 06:36:17 +0200
> From: heather.ford at oii.ox.ac.uk
> To: wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF's New Global South Strategy
> 
> 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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