[Foundation-l] The status of smaller languages on the Wikimedia Commons

Fri May 5 21:26:09 UTC 2006

Hoi,
There is one crucial difference between the en.wikisource.org and the
commons.wikimedia.org. The first is independent and all projects
should be able to depend on the second. Commons is not a project that
runs in a vacuum. The other projects are using Commons as as service.
They are involved in their own project. They do not really care about
anything else.

You laugh at the idea of the communities being your customers. I
wonder for whom you are doing all the good work that you are doing.
You want to consider the opinion of people who get their hands dirty.
I would say that the people, these customers make their hands dirty,
just not on commons.

In the past we have had issues the .svg being a notorious one. The
consequence has been that many people I know off do not post to
Commons anymore. A proposal on one project I know of to post only on
Commons was defeated because of the resulting sentiments. Indeed it is
your project, you do good work but your challenge is to do great work.

In my honest opinion, and that is for now the last of it, you need to
improve the communication to improve the image of Commons.

Thanks,
   GerardM

On 5/5/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
> --- Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > You do not get my point. When policies are to be
> > changed, when the way
> > things work are to be changed, this is when you
> > should inform the
> > communities in advance. Some careful marketing
> > communication is what is
> > needed. Marketeers call it customer relations. And
> > you /need /to inform
> > your customers; when you do, you talk to all your
> > customers when you
> > don't you have to deal with them one at a time and
> > you may find that
> > customers do no longer give you their custom. Given
> > how busy you are,
> > you would not even notice.
>
>
> I disagree with this sentiment in general terms.  If
> the "customers" are not making an effort to watch the
> pages where policy decisions are disscused, they
> should not expect to courted by those wishing to
> change policy.  The community that is actually doing
> the work of maintaining a project should have the
> ability to set policy without going out of their way
> to court the fly-by-night users of the project.  I do
> not think it is wise to try and alienate the less
> active userbase, but it is unrealistic to wait for
> their reaction before making any decisions.
>
> The English Wikisource recently made a major change to
> it's incluson guidelines (which involves the eventual
> deletion of around 200 pages).  We held open
> disscusion for over three weeks, and the material is
> now being slowly phased out without a mass deletion.
> Although there was a small amount of advertising
> amoung people with a specific interest, the
> participants in the disscusion did not vary from the
> regular editors.  I cannot agree that it should have
> been advertised at large across projects.  I am very
> happy with the way we have handled this situation
> which quite at odds with your sentiments.
>
> It would not be productive during a major policy
> disscussion to issue an invitation to people who have
> no idea how a project operates on a day-to-day basis.
> The community which actually *works* on a project
> needs to be the ones to set policy.  If the people you
> consider "customers" find that the community no longer
> serves their needs, they should work to carve out such
> a niche themselves.  These projects are all operating
> with a limited amount of volunteers and I cannot
> imagine any of them would ignore the corcerns of
> people willing to get their hands dirty.  But when
> someone has the mindset that they are a "customer" and
> want to reallocate these existing voluteers to take
> care of their pet issues, well I won't be so impolite
> as to express what I think of that.  Now they are
> welcome to share these concerns.  Many people can
> vouch that I am willing to drop my current project to
> help them deal with issue I agree is important when
> they bring to my attention.  But to say projects
> should not attempt to set policy unless they
> personally invite over all the people who are standing
> on the sidelines is ridiculous.  Even if such people
> are the most informed, intelligent, reasonable people
> on earth, they will not be a useful addition to policy
> disscusions until they have worked within the project
> and achieved such understanding that can only be
> gained by experience.  The fact that infrequent users
> may not *like* the communities policy descision is not
> reason enough to hold off on any decision till they
> have been consulted.
>
> Birgitte SB
>
>
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