On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi community members,
I'm wondering how many people might be interested in having an IRC meeting
regarding the community's relationship to WMF and potentially developing
our own strategic plan that would be independent of WMF. In the past few
days I've heard some defense of WMF but mainly criticism and pessimism,
especially people recalling past hurts and feeling powerless to negotiate
with WMF. Perhaps it's time that we in the community create our own
strategic plan and develop strategic options.
Please note that this would be a long-term planning meeting and we are not
likely to make major decisions, but we would start brainstorming and laying
some foundations.
Topics of possible discussion regarding our relationship with WMF:
1. Strategic options, such as finding alternative organizations to WMF for
hosting Wikimedia sites or creating a new hosting organization that is
aligned with community values.
I think this isn't as mad as it may sound. It seems some editors of the
English Wikipedia have a strong dislike for many of the WMF decisions, and
distrust the WMF staff to make the calls that are best for our shared
goals, and vice versa. It's been often said that competition would be good
for the project. It would lead to duplicated effort, yes. It also gives the
opportunity to learn from each other. I have always believed, and I still
believe, that the success of English Wikipedia hinges on the ability of the
community to generate content, and that that's the absolutely most
important part of English Wikipedia - all else, including consumption by
end users - follows from that. A fork where one project is more content
creation focused, and one more end-user presentation focused, with strong
cooperation between the two projects would IMO be absolutely great. Who has
the keys to the servers is less important IMO (which also keeps the option
open for an "in-house fork").
As an aside, I don't think there is such a thing as "community values". I
sincerely doubt there is even such a thing as a "community", or "community
consensus", even for a single project (though it might (still) exist for
smaller projects), and certainly not for the WikiMedia movement as a whole.
-- Martijn