Hi all,

In my personal opinion, the term "emerging communities" is much more
healthy and acceptable than Global South, which always sounded patronizing
and diminshing.

And I also like and celebrate the initiative to create our own definition :)


Cheers!
P.S.: The map in the link needs a thorough review ;)

El sept. 28, 2017 7:09 AM, "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com>
escribió:

> Hoi,
> For me this initiative raises more questions then it answers. As I
> understand it, it is a change in vocabulary and it defines when a
> Wikipedia  community is big enough to get "official" attention.
>
> My problem is that it is very much standalone; it does not connect with
> other practices. It does mention "incubating languages" but it does not
> mention the incubator. In the language committee we have had organisations,
> educational organisations who want to champion a language in their school.
> This makes them bigger than the limit of 10 editors. At this time we do not
> have a way to accomodate such requests. In my opinion for all the wrong
> reasons. The wrong reasons because we know how effective schools are in
> providing basic facts in a Wikipedia..
>
> Once the Wikimedia Foundation had a group of technical people who worked on
> language technology. Most of these people are still working at the WMF but
> they are no longer involved in language tech. This became obvious when a
> really worthy improvement for the Bashkir language, collation, was
> implemented by a volunteer and Amir blogged that he had supported it as a
> *volunteer*.. (he made a point of this). Particularly in the smaller
> languages issues like collation are areas where the Wikimedia could make a
> big difference. It is quite obvious that when we advertise the quality of
> our language support (and because of our existing font support it is
> already quite good) we can gain a lot of adventurous people.
>
> In the current approach to languages and support it is imho very much
> Wikipedia as we know it. We do not leverage the content in Wikidata as much
> as we could. There has a lot of acrimoniousness regarding the Cebuano
> Wikipedia. Millions of articles were generated as fixed text and
> consequently it is currently impossible to maintain it.  The root cause is
> our inability to cooperate. When this information was imported in Wikidata
> (and cooperate with the original source) we could generate the text and
> serve it as cached content. When the data is improved, the cached text gets
> changed. The fact that such things are not considered is proof perfect of
> opportunities wasted. Opportunities open to any language.
>
> So it would be really cool when we consider how we can "share in the sum of
> all our available knowledge". This is attainable if we dare to think
> through what we can achieve and how we can make the most out of our
> communities and the knowledge they hold.
> Thanks,
>        GerardM
>
> On 27 September 2017 at 19:28, Asaf Bartov <abar...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > Dear Wikimedians,
> >
> > Years ago, as part of the first Strategy process of 2009-2010, a
> > distinction entered our lives, between Global North and Global South
> > countries.  That distinction was borrowed from a United Nations agency
> > named ITU, and it was used as shorthand to refer to communities the
> > Foundation considered to need additional resources and help to achieve
> > impact on our mission of creating and sharing free knowledge.
> >
> > However, the distinction was never a very good fit for us.  It was based
> on
> > UN notions like the Human Development Index, and gave much weight to
> > nation-wide economic conditions.  Its binary nature did not allow for
> > distinguishing between countries where Wikimedia work is possible and
> > happening, albeit with difficulty, and ones where no Wikimedia work, or
> > next to none, is happening, or possible.  It also looked only at
> geography,
> > whereas much of our work is defined by language communities and not by
> > geographies.  And it was political and alienating to many people.
> >
> > In short, it was both not as useful as we needed it to be as well as
> > unloved and rejected by many.
> >
> > The Community Resources team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been
> thinking
> > about replacing that distinction with a more nuanced one, that would be a
> > much better fit with our needs, would take into account the actual state
> of
> > editing communities, would consider multiple axes beyond geography, and
> > would be less controversial.
> >
> > We began using the term "emerging communities" two years ago, first as a
> > replacement for the term Global South, but it has always been our
> intention
> > to define Emerging Communities ourselves.  Finishing the proposed
> > definition took a back seat for a while due to other priorities, but we
> are
> > ready to share the proposed definition today:
> >
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement/
> > Defining_Emerging_Communities
> >
> >
> > We welcome your thoughts, on the talk page (ideally) or on this thread.
> > The definition is already our working definition, but we are open to
> > incorporating changes to both wording and substance through October 31st.
> >
> > Be sure to take a look at the FAQ supplied at the bottom of the page,
> too.
> > :)
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> >     Asaf
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