Social dynamics of cross lingual collaboration

Notes of card storming meeting for "Social dynamics of cross lingual collaboration" in BabelWiki08 Workshop.

The three card on this cluster were:

1. Economics of Wiki translation
2. Social Engineering. How to encourage (& guide) volunteers
3. How to get students to collaborate in Wiki creation & and move them from inaction

We started with the question about what are the main factors that motivate people to translate content.

Some ideas came into the discussion:

• We have the sensation that 2% of users in Wikipedia, as a reference, do create content, and 98% of the users just read that content. What could we do to motivate another 2% of users to participate in translating current content?
• In some educational scenarios (mainly university degrees related to translation) many students have fun translating content.
• Some times we have the sensation that we created a solution which is looking for a problem to be solved, even if sometimes, we agree that the problem existed but it was not explicitly formulated.
• In some cases, unique page names using the UTF-8 character set are desired and pursued, but issues are still present with some browser not supporting them (or not by default and users don't know how to set that browser )