[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key priorities for my work)

[GerardM]

Hoi,
I think it is perfectly reasonable to expect people who are to play a part
in the organisation of the Wikimedia Foundation to have an obvious interest
in our projects. Expecting people to have edited on Wikipedia is a bad
example of yet again thinking the WMF is the same as Wikipedia. When you
want to have "important" or "notable" people governing our organisation and
you yourself get it wrong; indicating that there are "more ways to help us
with our mission than editing Wikipedia", I fear that they will also get it
wrong.

The Wikimedia Foundation is NOT Wikipedia. Boardmembers should have an
obvious interest in what we do. Being notable does not qualify people. If
you want someone notable, ask Kofi Anan to become a board member when his
tenure as the secretary general of the United Nations has ended. This is
what I call notable; notability as an IT person is not what I would think
qualifies a person as a board member of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Thanks,
     GerardM




On 9/25/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> Delirium wrote:
> > I disagree with that.  We have a huge body of people, and we're open to
> > anybody who wants to join---there's no membership criterion except
> > showing up (I'm not arguing for a "minimum 20,000 edits" or something).
> > Excluding people who have deliberately chosen *not* to help us with our
> > mission from being on the board seems perfectly reasonable to me.
>
> The point is, asking someone like Larry Lessig (and he is only one
> example, choose someone else you admire greatly if you have something
> against him) to become an active wikipedia editor as a condition of
> joining the board strikes me as silly.
>
> He has hardly "deliberately chosen *not* to help us with our mission".
> There are more ways to help us with our mission than editing Wikipedia.
>
> --Jimbo
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