Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-02-01/Strategic planning

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This currently says "Google ... recently pulled its operations out of China". Has it actually done so, or have they just said that they "might have to"? Google China doesn't mention anything past their January 12 statement. The January 19 post at their official blog says that they are still there, and that rumours of their shutting-down are false.[1] -- Quiddity (talk) 22:23, 2 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
See Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). -- Wavelength (talk) 00:32, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
I think the strategy participation is so miserable because it is still too difficult to contribute. I know you do a lot of efforts to make the strategy wiki accessible and simple, but maybe a wiki-style website is still not simple enouth for the majority of people. What I am personally missing is content rating - we should sort the proposals in as easy-readable pool like ideas.symbian.org or the IdeaStorm from Dell...--Kozuch (talk) 14:44, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Nishant Shah, Director of the Centre for Internet Research, recently put forth an interesting explanation for the fact that Wikipedia seems to have failed to mobilize a Chinese speaking user community as large as that of the government-censored Baidupedia. In this recent interview about the WikiWars conference which he organized in India (see also this week's News and notes), he said:

Because of how [Wikipedia] structures itself, a structure which for example says that it wants a neutral point of view, an NPOV, it excludes certain kinds of communities and people from writing and sharing their knowledge - it is not possible. So that in China, Wikipedia is not the most popular user generated content website - it is Baidupedia. [...] And it allowed for a certain Chinese sensibility, both in language and in culture, to produce certain kinds of knowledge systems which can be shared between the Chinese readers.

It is a bit surprising that an independent scholar aligns so well with the stance of the Chinese government (that concepts like freedom of speech etc. are "Western" values which do not apply to China), and in the interview it remains unclear why Chinese people should be culturally unable to write or read a NPOV article on one of the well-known sensitive topics like Falun Gong, but it is certainly a thought-provoking view.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 20:50, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia is a do-ocracy and so are the other wikimedia projects. The direction it will go is wherever editors choose to contribute. "We" is therefore whoever happens to turn up.

Most of the strategy wiki proposals are about new tools or improved tools so we can do things better or to help us do new things that editors think would be cool and would like to do. filceolaire (talk) 21:30, 3 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]