Wikiville

So we have grown up to the size of a small provincial town. According to this request for translation there are now some ~50K eligible voters (I'd say a good 60% of them should be native English speakers). This is good news.

The bad news are that according to the same request only 2,773 people (and 220 of them were accepted in error) have voted. This is an embarrassingly slow participation rate, at least for an organization that fosters the idea that information can be made in a democratic way.

The error that generated those 220 exceeding votes was in a wrong query that made eligible to vote all those who had already >200 edits at the March, 1 deadline. This means that lots of active new users were given the right to vote too soon. The result gets even more embarrassing: if only 4.84% of the eligible users voted, only 0.73% of the new ones did.

Yet, there is a big question mark behind the validity of these data: it's about their activity in time. As long as we simply count the absolute number of edits we have no clue at whether a user is STILL working in a WMF project or not. He/she might have reached the 400 barrier ages ago, and now might have long moved to other interests in life. So it's highly possible that a good deal of those new users are actually long gone, and the very same doubt applies to eligible voters.

Another factor that IMHO naturally slows the participation to vote is in the nature of our contributions to WMF, some of which are over-represented, while others are definitely under-rated. If I have to judge by my own work I'd say I'm one of those who gets excessive importance.

I mainly take care of interfaces, press contacts, general database consistence (i.e., categorization, grammar, formal rules). Someone must do it, in just any project, yet all of these jobs are carried out in such a way to produce thousands of edits. Think about what localizing the interface means. According to the old policies you first made ~1k edits to have your first UI in place, then you migrated it to Betawiki for better maintenance, got back the updated versions and made one more ~1k edits to clear the old resident messages.

As a result, I was an eligible voter after my first 24 hours in WMF. Had I chosen to write articles offline and spent weeks in a library to prepare them... it would have taken me ages to get there. I would also had felt very little need to read meta or the lists, because my natural counterpart would be books, or the outer net. See what I mean?

Wikies are made by people, and people behave mostly the same wherever they are, the Internet included. Some of us are deeply social and get bored in insulation, other feel they have a job to do and do not wish to waste their time in silly talks. It's not that the social ones are hanging out at wine bars; we simply have chosen that job, and we put in it the same amount of care that other people put in library searches. Yet as a matter of fact we end up in being over-represented.

So let me observe that while most of the web 2.0 marketing keeps boasting the Community value, when it comes to representation our own community is at the very best an oligarchy into another oligarchy. If we want higher vote rates we will have to develop social tools for those who are currently out of our social activities, and accept that in doing so we (the active social network) will loose a substantial share of our influence on WMF affairs.

There is also another risk connected to an enlargement in participation: it's called linguistic insularity. So far we had only minor intercultural clashes, mainly because the ruling social network is all based on English. When we spread socialization at contributors' level we will give birth to huge insulated linguistic nations in which contributors will elaborate their needs but they won't be able to represent them directly. Once again they will need the active social network in order to present their interests to WMF at large.

To a certain extent this is already happening, and it lead the to the transformation of the National Chapters from a simple accountant's trick meant to ensure donations' deductibility and a better press contact into more or less explicit linguistic parties who are fostering local interests. It's also leading to single contributors becoming sort of speakers for their communities (this happens even when Chapters aren't there at all).

Isn't this a fascinating adventure? We can learn an incredible amount of things by reading a wiki, but we can learn even more by simply living in it. Maybe we should make a videogame of it, to train our kids to manage cultural diversity.