"...very large scale effective political change..."
Well, if you're really believing that, perhaps you would like to focus on real global problems that are also connected to the problems of the Wikimedian community like creating a reliable education system in Sub-Saharan Africa? If you insist that the greatest problem we as a global movement face is the low living standard in U.S., we should, of course, start collecting donations in Bangladesh and Botswana right away.
Many members of this very mailing list are people from countries facing far worse situations than Americans (or Estonians, for that matter). Once you realize that, calls to support local Amerocentric actions don't sound very smart - even if they were relevant to this list's agenda.
Raul
On Thursday, November 28, 2013, James Salsman wrote:
On Nov 28, 2013 10:09 PM, "Amgine" <amgine@wikimedians.ca<javascript:_e({}, 'cvml', 'amgine@wikimedians.ca');>> wrote:
I do not believe we have meaningful control over either the economic or the physiological health of the editor pool.
It has been established by example that the English Wikipedia is able to influence its readership politically to generate very large scale effective political change from calls to action. We are also a primary source of information about health for both physicians and lay people. More directly, the Foundation now makes decisions about how to compensate editors and chapters based on the merit of their proposals as submitted, directly.
So, for example, if there were a banner directing people to fixmyjob.comor heathcare-now.org, there is no reason to believe it would not generate very substantial support from readers and have a large actual, and probably measurable, impact on the extent to which they are truly empowered to contribute.
Ignoring political realities of the factors that influence the day to day lives of editors, potential, current, and former, is just that -- willful ignorance. When the legal team was threatened with the potential troublesome overhead of removing links due to SOPA/PIPA, the community supported action to prevent that. When are we going to take action to support the wider editor community?
Pretending that political and economic factors are somehow out of the scope of the mission requires imagining that the mission statement says something about them. It does not. What is the relative impact on a potential editor who might not be able to include hyperlinks to copyrighted media because of SOPA versus one who has to work two jobs to make ends meet?
Why is political neutrality on economic issues preferable to political neutrality on intellectual property law issues? The latter is a subset of the former. Acting as though one side of economic political debates is not more accurate than their opposition in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is tantamount to the worst kind of "he said, she said" journalism, which in this case is not only an affront to the readers who expect occasional rational calls to action, but actively harms the rate at which the encyclopedia is improved.