Wiki Holidays

So we are back. It's been a long trip through unexpectedly different climates, a lot of people met and our first experience of pregnant travel, so also the first trip for our small Maria Catlin-a, although during the trip we did not know whether she was going to be born as a male or a female, she's only 4 months old now, and she'll see her first ray of light in February.
In Piedmont the weather was surprisingly cold. We managed to move a bit but not enough to organize the improvised piedmontese wikimania I had crazily thought to launch just a few days before flying there. The event is better moved to next spring, when people will not be on holydays and the weather will hopefully be more stable.

So why wiki holydays? For the simple reason that much to my surprise everyone I met wanted to know about pms.wiki. I had planned a general meeting of us contributors, it turned out to be an endless meeting of readers and sympathizers. No, I'm not saying that oceanic masses were out there screaming Wiki! Wiki!, but there was no single meeting with friends, relatives and even absolutely unknown people during which pms.wiki failed to appear as a subject, and I never was the one who started the subject.
The first time it was surprising, the second time I laughed, but from the third time on I realized that something is happening and started to make some checks.

First of all, I decided to quit speaking Italian at all. Years ago that would have been enough to bring about stormy weather, now basically all natives I met switched to it in 2-3 phrases time, nobody ever protested that I was "speaking dialect". The most interesting detail is that even non-natives did not protest. Those who could not understand it said so, and that was it. I switched to Italian for them. I even managed to change my dollars into euro speaking piedmontese in a bank, in the middle of Turin. This would have been simply unimaginable just a few years ago, during the "fascist age", in which everything not Italian was automatically attacked. So maybe fascism is really dieing, in Italy.

Possibly this is one of the best side effects brought about by the recent migratory waves. Since Italian is not THE dominant language anymore, people have relaxed and realized that there is more than one obligatory idiom on earth.
Anyway, maybe it's not even a matter of fascism. It's rather the fact that years ago everyone I know was politically active (on very different fronts, but all them were). Now I met in all ONE person who still has a political life, although he is admittedly tired of it. Everybody else told me straight that they'll never vote again. It looks like a giant social wave, just think that the italian summer best-seller is a book called La casta (the caste). It deals with how Italian politicians have developed into a self-referential closed oligarchy. As a result, an enormous quantity of intellectual resources is freed from politics and available for a better use, hence the interest for wikies, among other things.

Now the problem is how we can capture these resources. You might be surprised, but while most people in the streets know that a wiki is a user-made encyclopedia, most of them do not think that they could write themselves. Most of them were surprised, when I told them so. The usual reaction is a puzzled "ME?!" look. An encyclopedia looks terribly BIG, even a small one. Too big and serious a job for an amateur. So I eventually started to tell people that what they can do is donate their pictures to commons. This was met with much less anxiety; although it's making me answer lots of skype calls from friends that simply get lost in the tons of things that crowd our "main" pages.
So I'm considering the idea of publishing a small "wiki for dummies" guide in pms, to help people understand how they can help. IMHO, it's a problem of gradualism. First you sell them the fact that their pictures are actually documents of social relevance, as they let everyone know how a monument looks like, and then you can ask them to add some data about their town. Once they start to edit an article most of them will never stop anymore.