Word: attraction
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...opening bravado often descends into recrimination and regret. Of course, there are obvious benefits for an Olympic host city - primarily the opportunity to showcase itself in front of a global TV audience numbering in the billions. Indeed, many view the Olympics as the ultimate infomercial to help attract business and foreign direct investment...
...stats suggest that hard-core participants are a pretty homogeneous set - the opposite of the ecumenical wiki ideal. Women, for instance, make up only 13% of contributors. The project's annual conference in Buenos Aires this summer bustled with discussions about the numbers and how the movement can attract a wider class of participants...
...that gets to Wikipedia's central dilemma. Chi's research suggests that the encyclopedia thrives on chaos - that the more freewheeling it is, the better it can attract committed volunteers who keep adding to its corpus. But over the years, as Wikipedia has added layers of control to bolster accuracy and fairness, it has developed a kind of bureaucracy. "It may be that the bureaucracy is inevitable when a project like this becomes sufficiently important," Chi says. But who wants to participate in a project lousy with bureaucrats...
...foundation has been working to address some of these issues; for example, it is improving the site's antiquated, often incomprehensible editing interface. But as for the larger issue of trying to attract a more diverse constituency, it has no specific plan - only a goal. "The average Wikipedian is a young man in a wealthy country who's probably a grad student - somebody who's smart, literate, engaged in the world of ideas, thinking, learning, writing all the time," Gardner says. Those people are invaluable, she notes, but the encyclopedia is missing the voices of people in developing countries, women...
...forum is unlikely. (Vyacheslav Shport, the governor of the Khabarovsk region, sounded like any old congressman when he suggested the key to economic recovery was more cash for a local Air Force base. "This is an excellent Far East project for the creation of high-tech innovation that could attract investment and defend industries from crisis events," he said.) Of course, substance wasn't the Kremlin's goal. The goal was to send a message to the locals (and especially local officials): You are part of Russia. You are being taken care of. We are one. (See pictures of Vladimir...