What to do to counter an institutional bias of the Wikimedia Foundation (part 2)

Our aim is to share the sum of the knowledge available to us with everyone, everywhere, in every language. That is what we are to achieve.

As we establish what we, as a movement, are to do, it follows that we need to measure how well we do. When a community does not play an active part for a particular goal, that too will show in the numbers.

Commons does not need to work in English only. The "Special:MediaSearch" works in all the languages we support. With this search engine enabled on every Wikipedia, we will learn how well it gets adopted in  all our languages. We will know if new Wikidata labels are used in searches on Commons. We will know if more diversity is realised in the pictures used in Wikipedia. We will know how many pictures are downloaded and from what languages.

Only in the Portuguese Wikipedia we find the governors of Mozambican provinces only in text. We can include them in Wikidata, make Listeria lists for them, but how do we disambiguate these politicians. What does it take to make the information for them usable for "abstract Wikipedia"?  How do we assemble information about countries like Mozambique and how do we get it to the quality level that some expect? As important, how do we get people from Mozambique interested and involved? 

Some Wikipedians opine that the Wikimedia Foundation does not need to raise funding for their project. Arguably this is correct, but we can raise funds for other projects, other languages elsewhere because we have more and other ambitions to realise. As we raise more money outside of the USA, more people will gain a sense of ownership. 

When we are to overcome our bias for English and our bias for Wikipedia, we need to market our other languages, our other projects. We need key performance indicators.. For Wikisource, how many books were downloaded. For Commons how many media files were downloaded and from what language.

Results need to be objective and measurable. As our research proves to have been about English Wikipedia we have a problem. We seriously need to consider to what extend it is applicable.

Thanks,

      GerardM

NB While the bias is real and the relationship with English Wikipedians is often antagonistic, it is important to recognise  English Wikipedia as the source for much of the information that ends up in other projects. When we collaborate more, our available data will reach more people in an informative way.