Notes on participation

Joan Goma:

The forum has several goals. I am personally interested in the goal of building communities. I am very worried about the evolution of the team of wikipedia editors. In Catalan Wikipedia we are growing slowly but this grow i the result of a “natural” decline hidden by about 50 new editors recruited every month trough many activities. So if we relied only on Internet we were in a clear decline.

I hope that in this forum we will go a step further from analyzing the situation and hypothesizing about its possible causes. This has already been done for example in documents like: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?authkey=CNK2oI8G&key=0Aq_nhKkb7L-OdFdzTG1KTUxVeXBOS0hhdWZMVmtxNUE&hl=en&authkey=CNK2oI8G#gid=0

I would like to end with a list of concrete proposals to boosts the editing community. Then we will apply those ideas in Catalan Wikipedia. I think Catalan wikipedia is big enough to suffer the same phenomena than in larger ones but it is small enough and has a cohesionated team of editors open to accept experiments. Later by measuring the situation before and after each experiment perhaps we can write a draft “how to” on growing wikipedia editorial community. (perhaps applicable to any free digital commons building community)

We have invited people from other free knowledge and software communities from whom we think we can learn and also people from wikimedia movement we think they have experiences and ideas that can help.