20 Nov 14:58
[EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week
From: Christophe Henner <christophe.henner@...>
Subject: [EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week
Newsgroups: gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation
Date: 2007-11-20 13:58:35 GMT
Subject: [EWW] Edit Wikipedia Week
Newsgroups: gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation
Date: 2007-11-20 13:58:35 GMT
Dear community, Few days ago a pretty neat idea was proposed, an idea which could involves all of the community members, all of you: the "Edit Wikipedia Week". That week will take place from December 3 to 8, 2007 and the concept is pretty simple: you, as a community member, will have the chance to spread the word about how to edit Wikipedia or learn how to work on one of the other sister projects. We want it to be a worldwide event, and why not, transforming it into an annual event. Everyone can be involved in helping to stage a bunch of "Edit Wikipedia Week" events during that week. The idea is to stage outreach events around the world designed to encourage people to participate in the projects. The events can be practically anything – big or small. It doesn't matter how simple they seem to be, everything counts. You can talk about the project at a local school; get yourself booked for a television appearance; have a chat for a local photography club about the advantages of contributing to Commons; organize a marathon weekend for translations; discuss the different uses of the WikiPolicies to a group of regular users you know in your place, recruit new people to help you launch a WikiProject, or even just teach your mom how to press a button, edit an article and save. Simple steps that will help the world to know just what are we doing here, and why are we doing it. Anything you think will improve the projects is valid: the idea is to reach out to people who don't edit, or have no idea what Wikipedia is, and encourage them to contribute on the project. Edit Wikipedia Week is intended to be an experiment. The premise is(Continue reading)
But I disagree with you. The
point of broadening participation is exactly to increase quality and
to reduce systemic bias of content authored by a predominantly white,
young, male, nerdy community.
That said -- of course any growth of our community needs to be
managed. And while the stable versions project may look like it's
frozen, it's not: the demo site linked from quality.wikimedia.org has
resulted in a lot of feedback, additional work has gone into vetting
the extension for security and scalability issues, and only the
necessary work on fundraiser-related tech issues is pushing the date
for deployment and further testing a bit.
With two full-time developers, any strategic high priority project is
difficult to execute. That's part of the reason we need to grow the
organization, and we need all the help we can get in developing
fundraising and revenue strategies that will allow us to do so. (That
said, if you are an open source developer, nothing is stopping you
from contributing to the code directly -- I will gladly point you to
the right places to do so.)
IMO the natural evolution of Wikipedia will be such that there will be
a growing separation between "collaboration spaces" and "reading
spaces" -- both require different social norms and different
). Would it be possible to
create a new poster with some sort of blank space so people could
write in the details, and to orientate the eye to this space? Such a
poster might want to reduce the emphasis on the dates of the *week*,
in favour of the date of the *event* (which would be filled in by the
event organiser) - while the dates of the week could be mentioned in a
slightly smaller general explanatory note, perhaps toward the bottom.
I've left this note on the designer's (Mushi) talk page, but feel free
to add suggestions, or to actually implement the idea yourself.. 
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