Gaps in recommendations: How to increase participation in under-represented group?

How are we going to address the gaps in recommendations from the inactive task forces? In general, we need to talk about if there is missing areas that still need to be addressed.

I started a thread on the talk page of Reader Conversion task force about one missing recommendation that I think is key. But since the task force is not active, I'm highlighting it here, too.

• Thread:Talk:Task force/Reader Conversion/Missing recommendations about how to increase participation in under-represented group.

Yeah, this is disappointing. The community health task force focused mostly on "reducing user deaths" -- new users and experienced users. But we need a task force at the other end who is trying to "encourage user births", and getting people who have never tried editing to give it a shot.

On the recommendations page (Task force/Recommendations), I've added a section for those task forces that were unable to come to a recommendation, and a proposal by Sara Crouse (the WMF Head of Foundation Relationships) to address one of those gaps. I hope that those people who care about particular "gap" issues will take the chance to do the same thing with other areas that interest them!

The reader conversion group really seems to have had alot of discussion on the subject. I bet that if their discussions are summarized and the main themes crystalized, that group ain't very far from at least having identified the main problems to solve. Maybe some strategies also would turn out from such a summary. This was pretty much what I did with the Local language project Task Force when it didn't take of. Don't think I have time at the moment to do something simmilar for that group though.

I am a huge fan of wiki services although this is my first peek behind the curtain so to speak. I'm sure this might have been mentioned as a way of recruiting more contributers, but I was thinking links back to a few of your personally edited wiki pages would look impressive listed on a persons resume web page. I could see the opportunity to strengthen one's resume experience, as a very legitimate reason to become an wiki editor. If explained well to the millions of wiki users, I'm sure you would substantially boost your numbers across the board.

"User births". I like that. Make sure you guys check the thread I started above. It is relevant to your discussion, and concerns the idea of Sticky notes.

I updated the task force page to reflect my thinking on this, and I'm going to send an email out about it as well.

Now that Phase 2 is over, we have the opportunity to regroup. One of things that can and hopefully will happen is a discussion of issues that have not yet been addressed, such as reader conversion. That can happen two ways:

1. We can just have a discussion about it.
2. We can reform some Task Forces.

If people are motivated to do number 2, I think that would be great. We can use a similar process (articulated on the task force page), and I think it would be very valuable for the process as a whole, and perhaps beyond.

Thoughts?

I am not quite sure what you mean by reforming the task forces. In the task force I participated, first we have some users who signed up and started some discussions, gradually all of them disappeared, then other users came and discussed, and then the third generation compiled the recommendations. I did not yet look at how other task forces were performing, but if this is a generic situation then reforming does not make any sense, since anyway users are doing what they find interesting/important, and they are not overall serious about formally signing up for participation.

That is the wiki-way.

To find a quick solution, maybe we could take a look into Interviews and list some recommendations from there? Maybe there are some proposals too.

I would may be suggest listing the priorities instead. I personally do not have too much time, may be couple of hours per day, and so far I was spending these two hours on replying to the remarks on the Quality Taskforce recommendations. If there are things with higher priority, like urgently looking at other Task force recommendations, or compiling things we did not have time to compile, I am willing to do them.

I don't think it would be a bad idea to just go over the work that the reader conversion task force did, summarize the key areas of recommendation, and then pick the top 2-4.

We shouldn´t call these pages Recommendation but Quotations, and I would add some quotations from the interviews too. I give you an example, the interview from Achal Prabhala and Lova Rakotomalala. By the way, there are some additional task forces: Task force/Africa and Task force/BLP without recommendation, but maybe there are some quotations.

I understand the challenges and suggestions all of have described. I think the challenge we're facing right now is that we need to have a group that is committed to continuing the important discussions we still need to have, that will integrate feedback from others, and that will summarize this thinking into a draft strategic plan.

I drafted a page for a "strategy" task force. I'd like to start shifting conversations about next steps there. Feedback encouraged.

Can we have some statics of the present usage of wikipedia in India both in terms of readership and contribution. I checked Alexa it suggests India contributing to 5.8% of wikipedia's total traffic http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org#trafficstats which is forth highest among all the countries.

We need to understand the problem better before we try to solve it, and also we should have some expectation laid out regarding our goal.

Hi there -

You might start with Regional_Analysis/South_Asia. After that, if you'll let me know what you need, I'll do my best to point you to it. :)

Thanks a lot for sharing this, the discussion section has captured some of the real issues which are serious blockers for wikipedia's growth in Indian languages. Even with out questioning the importance of Indian language content in wikipedia it can be said that the context is very different in India, below are few points worth considering for strategy formulation.

1. The typical internet users demography do not overlap the demography of people who is inclined to work on local languages (typical to India).
2. There is a high readership of Indian languages not because of inability with English, but because of the nature of content (read geographically and culturally relevant content)
3. Majority of the growth of Indian content has to come from non metro/urban users and it has to be backed up by strong offline efforts like community participation, involvement with mainstream primary and secondary education system.

INDIA IS FASTEST GROWING COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IN TERMS OF INTERNET,SO BEING AN INDIAN I KNOW THAT MORE THAN 99% OF PEOPLE WHO USES COMPUTER(BUT NOT INTERNET) ARE FAMILIER WITH ENGLISH.I NEVER SAW AN INDIAN IN MY WHOLE LIFE WHO USES COMPUTER AND UNFAMILIER WITH ENGLISH.I CAN GUARANTEE THAT 100% OF PEOPLE WHO USES INTERNET ARE FAMILIER WITH ENGLISH. FROM: PUSHKAR [personal information removed]

Pushkar, when writing in English it is considered impolite to write in capitals because it is akin to SHOUTING. Thanks for your contribution. Where did you find your statistics?

Not only do Indians on the Internet all know English, but without English there would be no nation of India. There are hundreds of languages used in India. Amost all Indians know at least 2. Their local or traditional language and English. Without English most parts of India would not be able to communicate with other parts. Unlike nations where there are two or three languages and everyone can make an effort to learn those and thus communicate as a nation, India has too many languages for that. English is the linga Franca of India. This has become institutionalized for so long that the Indian version of English is developing into its own dialect. Ironically, there are many Englishmen or Americans who cannot easily understand Indian English. Fortunately for Wikipedia and the Internet, the written form of Indian English is much closer to other forms, however where there is a coming problem is with the greater use of audio and video on the Internet and soon I hope with Wikipedia. Even now there are U-Tube Indian English videos which non Indians have difficulty understanding the audio. It is on audio that the issue of Indian communications hangs.

--71.191.32.66 20:10, 30 January 2010 (UTC)