Congratulations and Thanks to the authors

Nothing in particular, I just feel like we're (as a movement) too focused on 'western-academic' style content. That's my personal favorite kind of content, so I'm happy here. But if we construe our mission too narrowly, we'll miss out on the billions of people who have different personalities, different interests, and different needs.

I don't have a specific new type of content in mind, but I know lots of others do: Category:Proposals_for_new_projects has lots, and many of the other proposals for new features entail proposals for new projects/content types. There are proposals for us to do things besides just create content-- create tools for people to socialize or form communities.

I hope that in the future, we can empower people to 'be bold' in creating new projects, features, apps, etc. Right now if I have an idea for a new WM project, I can't just go create it and try it out. I assume this is for technical reasons, but I don't know for sure.

I'm encourage to see that the project ideas are being solicited, and hope all conceivably-viable proposals for "new projects" get a chance to go live and see if they add something to our movement or not.

There's a interview, I've seen, about a Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba, who at age 14 "built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book." At the very end of the interview, he talks about his first experience, years later, using google:

I say ‘OK, let’s google windmill then.’ And then when I Googled windmill, I find that there are millions of applications. And then I say ‘Where was this Google all this time?’" [1]

Ultimately, that's where we need to be stepping in. Providing 0-cost, 'open' information services to the people of the world-- especially the people who need it most, in the excellently termed "Global South". The content they create may not look anything like Wikipedia-- "where could I get some copper wiring?" may be more important to them than Biographies of US celebrities. But whatever content they create-- it will still have value to them, even if that content doesn't fit with our preconceptions of what 'western academic' knowledge looks like.

That's all I was saying. Hundreds of proposals for new projects = Awesome way to bring newbies into the fold!

StochasticOrange07:55, 26 April 2011