[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and the networked society

[Berto]

Hi!

> It is a
> shame that introspection, statistics about our communities and
> ourselves, internal research efforts, have not been a larger part of
> recent years' growth.
It is. But maybe here one of the pillars (no original research) is at least
partly responsible. Formally we cannot publish research on ourselves until
someone else does not publish it somewhere else first. Yes we have META for
this, but how many people go there? I suppose that a deeper introspection
will have to be encouraged somehow.

> that spending too much time discussing or thinking about priorities
> and future direction is a distraction from building the projects or
> writing an encyclopedia.
It's an understandable position. Yet once you have over 1 million articles
publihed maybe it's time to look for more than just horizontal growth.

> The long-term discussion about planning for, devotion to, and passing
> on the message and goals of the projects falls to all of us -- not
> ...
> also those who care enough to donate money or critical
> rants or expert advice, readers who would not dare contribute to an
> encyclopedia but have relevant experiences in other areas of life to
> add to planning discussions, and the friends and colleagues and family
> of the above, interested enough to participate in such discussions if
> they knew about them but not yet aware they exist.[2]

Yes. Can't sell a thing unless you market it. Being a top-20 site may help,
yes we do get money and human resources anyway, but the real question is:
how much more we could get and are not getting?

>  those who feel broad-based discussions are criminal, or wastes
> of time:
Are invited to join the discussion and to prove their point :)))) If you
come and cannot prove your point by discussing it, then it really is just a
waste of time, so... help us prove OUR point to prove that you are right :)
Neat, isn't it? :))))))))))))))))

> Are we dominated by people with no full-time jobs and no children?
A new Middle Age? Clerics are an option, really. I can personally enroll in
the no children part, at least so far. I suppose this research should
include another determinant topic: what are the main interests of the
community, i.e., what are we writing about? Maybe the absence of a wide
amount of child-related articles might mean a lot... I personally noticed
astounding grey areas as much as food is concerned... are we mostly eating
in MacDonald's? I'm serious. Wikipedia content does have an impact on the
kind of contributors we are attracting. 99% of us got to know the wiki
because we found information on it by googling around. Eventually we ended
up in the wiki so frequently that we started to use it. If information on a
given subject is poor or lacking we may simply miss to attract the consumers
of such an information segment. Do we need to subside strategic information
segments to enlarge our user base?

> we could have a
> simple projects-wide survey completed within a month.  Let's make this
> a priority and make such a thing happen -- then figure out how to
> optimize future iterations.
Any start is better than nothing.

> ps - while looking for the link to the user survey on meta, I ran
> across this: a poll applet that seems to be working as of last month.
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Poll
how can we localize it and put it in the local editions?

> Wikipedians speculate about the future all the time.  And yet I say we
> rarely engage serious discussion of priorities, dreams, timelines,
> goals, and opportunity costs.  Why is this?
Because we all love to chat, and this is a pretty casual approach to
problems. Making a decision takes time, and people often end up in making it
in closed circles of friends, instead of bringing the whole thing to public,
where it would be drawned in endless chatting and no decision at all. The
very capability of making decisions is one of the weakest points in the wmf.
Or maybe it is its best strenght? I would think twice before saying loud
that it's one of the two. As it is, the monster seems to have no head,
things just happen in the most chaotic fashion ever, yet they keep
happening.

Yes we do miss self-awareness, basically one can tell where we are going to
only once we already got there, based on pure evidence. But are we sure that
by becoming more aware of ourselves it would be any better? I mean... lots
of societies (just think of Italy, since I'm a citizen there I'll quote that
to avoid offending other cultures) simply ignore any rule. Laws are written
everyday and they all are blatantly ignored by the population, lawmakers
included. It sounds like hell, yet a number of people go there each every
year and the place managed to build up a number of great cities. Is
wikipedia an anarchistic-oriented latin society? Isn't the community simply
"doing it" and refusing to spend time in discussions while they can "do it
themselves their own way"? Most signals would suggest that this is what
users really do. So yes, we do need to plan and be aware of what we do, but
from the other hand... aren't we risking to damage our own wondertoy?

The problem is that we need to do both. We need a central administration to
get funds, to invest them and to make sure it's not 200k users all spending
their nights to make the very same template, but... we also have the problem
the users are not paid, so they are free. Free for wmf to use them, and free
for them to do whatever they wish. It's really a complex equilibrium we are
dealing with. How binding may a decision be, if made by a minority?
Obviously it is binding, to a certain extent. A project can be closed,
another can be funded, and by this very fact the flow of human resources
gets canalized. Having a wider discussion would mean that the opinion of low
level contributors may become more relevant to what this "technical elites"
decide. Only...

Only there is currently no barrier (let alone being able to speak decent
english) for anyone to join such "elites". Anyone wishing to do so is
absolutely welcome. Actually is more problems waiting to be solved than
volunteers wishing to undertake community work. So we have no "feudal
barrier" in wmf. IMHO, we cannot expect this to undego any substantial
change. People are NOT interested in WMF as such. A small minority of users
is interested into becaming a contributor, and an even smaller percent is
interested into wmf as such. Mostly it's people being not too young and
having a hip for "politics" (in the social, non-ideological sense of the
word). When you say that meta has 2k active contributors it looks small...
but how many would be left in the count, if you took off all those enrolling
just to fight pro or against a single language? Not many, I'm afraid.

So okay, we need a better marketing. We need to enroll people wishing to "go
meta". Where from?
1) the editions
2) the virtual streets

If we get these people from the editions, a lot of their time is going to be
lost for the edition(s) itself. So we engage into an internal competition
for human resources. Not nice. Okay, but if we get them from outside the
communities... than making the strategies will be in the hands of people who
do not even know what an interwiki link looks like. Will the community
accept such decision-makers? I for one would not. So possibly the only
sensible answer is: get more contributors. Let's see... 200k contributors
make (let's be optimistic) 2k meta-involved people. Where do we get some
100k contributors from, to enlarge the META-base?

Last but not least... what will we do once a growing number of people who
aren't speaking english at all will want to have a say in such decisions? If
we only push them all into national chapters and say "learn to speak
properly if you want make yourself a career" all we do is making grounds for
a number of de facto secessions... Honestly this last detail is worrying me
much more than anything else. And no, I have no idea whatsoever of how the
problem can be addressed. But it must be addressed, unless we want that
1/100 factor of "meta involvement" drop to 10 or 100 times less.

> These comparisons *should* be made.
Yes. absolutely right.

> Unfortunately, these discussions tend to peter out and get lost.
> Mailing list threads are dropped and never wikified
The problem is that it's hard to wikify a discussion. I'd publish an "essay"
on Meta, but what if I want to answer like this? Wikimedia is a wonderful
piece of software, but it makes a poor forum. I can wikify what you
published, I'll try and wikify the relevant parts of my answer, but... I
have the recurrent feeling that one of the reasons why we miss a wider
discussion is simply because it's hard to discuss on a wiki.

> Do you know someone who works at a multinational volunteer collective?
Myself. The Dutch Barge Association is organizing the 2009 Black Sea Rally
(from Ireland to Kiev and back by internal waterways and seas). It's very
complicated, as it means crossing the Bielorussian border on private boats,
and passing 200m away from Chernobyl. For the organization we use... a
closed wiki. Over 200 stubs were needed just to map small needs like gas
connectors, diesel availability, etc.

> Find out what they think the
> parallels are between their organizations or projects and ours.
1) DBA has an external goal. Wiki is a means to us. Here the means coincide
with the end.
2) DBA has but 1400 members (some 800 barges, I believe), a clear internal
hyerarchical structure, periodical mass meetings, a paper magazine. Internet
is very important to us, but we mostly do our stuff on real water and meet
in real life. The whole structure was born as a traditional english "user
group" in the 90's, when a growing number of englishmen started to buy old
dutch Tjalken and Luxemotors for them to cruise on european inland waters.
3) Projects are largely born much in the way they are born here. If anyone
has enough political ability to collect support for a project, than it will
eventually become an official thing.
4) While we do actively lobby whenever european laws come to touch our
interests, the only funding we request goes to canal dredging and lock-gates
maintainance. DBS is fully funded by the 50 quids we pay each every year to
get our memberships.
5) The community is keeping a constant eye on whatever happens, I can hardly
think of something like META for us. Our village is too small to have
unknown districts.
6) We do have minorities (sailing barges). Yes, I'm into minorities even
there :) Must be something in my DNA :)
7) Vandalizing pages is potentially dangerous for the life of our members
(all it takes is moving navigational data), so we do not accept anonymous
contributions. If you are not a member you need a member to grant for you in
order to be accepted.
8) There has been a long discussion before accepting to use a wiki for the
project. Many people rated wmf as "too chaotic" for them to accept anything
coming from here. Yet now consensus is that the wiki is useful, and IMHO it
really is. I forced the decision by setting up the wiki myself and emitting
the first users. Once it stopped to be a concept and it became "simply a
tool" all doubts vanished. I expect another major cruising association to
adopt a closed wiki in the next future.

Bèrto