China and Africa

Perhaps the solution is to have a separate fund devoted to those who wish to have their donations put into regions like China and Africa in order to spread the base out of the Western world? If it is about relocating resources, I would think the donors should be the ones to determine such. After all, one of the classic concepts about Wikipedia was about giving poor children in Africa who have only computer access and not large libraries the ability to tap into a huge educational resource. It would be rather impossible if we turned our backs on them, no? Ottava Rima 01:26, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Nobody has suggested turning our backs on them. They would retain access to Wikipedia, our other projects, and the multiple languages thereof. It's just that the FOUNDATION - the legal entity - would not invest in new projects there, which it's not doing today. The status quo is maintained...

Philippe - Proposals for closing projects at meta. Sango, Twi, Kirundi, etc. There are many, many African language wikis for languages that have millions of people. They are being closed because of lack of participation. I do not have figures on any correlation between amount of spending by the WMF to advertise about these wikis and in the African regions where the languages are predominate, but I am going off the assumption that there is little money invested. If the Foundation is unwilling to put as much money as it currently invests in Africa for these languages (assuming there is any at all), then the rate of drying up of African language wikis would only increase. That concerns me. Ottava Rima 01:55, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

As to "investing in [projects]", it's not a zero-sum game. I see three interlocked groups: priorities, opportunities, and resources (are there more in that vein?). Other global efforts with their own priorities, in a position to point to or create opportunities, have resources that they don't always know how to direct; when we can identify ways to combine the three, everyone benefits. It would be helpful to see a breakdown of specific proposals along those lines:

 mission priorities   
      --->  proposals to accomplish each priority
                  ---->  costs of each proposal  
                  ---->  dependencies, shared components
 
 opportunities  
      --->  proposals to take advantage of each opportunity
                  ---->  gains from each proposal (including new resources)
                  ---->  mission priorities furthered by each
 
 resources available 
      --->  ways to get more of each resource
                  ---->  partners
                  ---->  calls for help
      --->  proposals depending on each resource

Separating priorities, opportunities, and resources would help avoid some of the current confusion, where "not a priority for investment" is being interpreted as "not supported from in terms of interpretation of the mission".

Perhaps we can phrase "not a priority" better: divide opportunities into "funding and messaging priority", "important goal needing further analysis; way forward is not clear", "goal best achieved by regional groups, chapters, and languages", and "not a core priority". The first three should all be pursued enthusiastically wherever there are low-cost high-impact solutions. [the bottleneck is identifying those solutions]

Very few areas that had a serious Task Force assigned to them fall into the last category -- they were selected precisely because they are a priority for some parts of our current efforts, or because they are representative of a large potential effort or audience not currently served but addressed by our mission.

Echoing Philippe's comments above: The beauty of free culture is that people can invest in the countries of their choice without going through the Foundation. The Google Translation Toolkit project is a good example of this. They initially chose to focus on Indian languages, Arabic, and Swahili, and they're now focusing on Korean. Kenya/Tanzania and South Korea were not countries that emerged as "top priority" countries in the analysis on this wiki, but Google is doing great work in those regions for their own reasons. And everyone benefits from that.