[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and the networked society

[SJ]

Hi, Berto.

You're right that Meta isn't a place for most people to communicate;
how could a 'deeper introspection' be carried out?  The idea of simply
attracting more people there is interesting; and doesn't require yet
another focal point.

The absence of articles can be powerful; you can tell a lot about a
community by what it describes, and what it doesn't write about.


> 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?

I wonder if we really refuse to spend time in discussions.  There are
many places to discuss things (sometimes just procrastinating work on
the projects) but one rarely has a clear position on priorities or
large-picture timelines when these matters come up.  The community
includes many great essay-writers... but when a few people write down
their long-term plans, there is nowhere to put it.  We lack a critical
mass of interest to curate these ideas into something reusable.
   I don't know what will disrupt the current wonder, if anything.
But there are some slow not-wonderful changes that could be improved
upon.

> 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
<
> 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?

Half of the answer is being better about engaging other languages,
which are largely absent on Meta.  Designing better multilingual
patches, error messages, portals (Commons does a better job)...
another half is to link explicitly to Meta from the projects as a
place for a certain kind of discussion [right now you have to look for
a while to know it exists]

> 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?

A related question.  Develop a more active or explicit class of
language-bridge contributors, and a simple way to say "I need language
assistance"?

--SJ

-----------------

On 9/22/06, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
> B�rto
>
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-- 
++SJ