On Thu, Nov 6, 2008 at 11:16 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2008/11/6 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
on 11/6/08 10:34 AM, Jim at trodel@gmail.com wrote:
Eric, In my opinion this survey highlights one of the issues that I have with
the
wikimedia foundation __a failure to collaborate - utilize wikipedians
and
wikipedia__
By this I mean a failure to use the talented people that are part of the community and failure to use wikipedia as a resource to find those
people.
Jim,
What an incredibly astute and very accurate observation. I will be very interested in the response.
Likewise. It does, indeed, seem to be a recurring feature of the WMF's mistakes. (I should clarify, I think most of what they do is great, but there are things that aren't so good and most of them seem to boil down to not consulting the community so that problems could be spotted and fixed before they actually become problematic.)
I should also clarify that I think the WMF is awesome! The good far outweighs the bad, and, in the past, I have felt that most of the criticisms of the foundation (executive leadership, transparency, etc) where impatient as they were the result of a fast-growing organization that was doing well considering the difficulties and challenges that it faced.
I would just like to see the foundation leverage the efforts and willingness of its volunteers to give of their time and talents in new ways i.e. in ways other than 1) helping new users and solving problems (OTRS), 2) build documents and content (Wikipedia and its progeny) and 3) programing code (Wikimedia and its extensions).
This is especially important as the foundation develops a professional staff. Before if something was to get done it was by volunteers (and usually quite a few of them) who had contributed to the project and were deeply vested in its success. Now they can be done as a job assignment, and it will become increasingly possible to have projects taken on by a smaller group of people (school projects, dissertations/thesis in addition to employees) who now have a way(through responsive foundation employees) to communicate and get permission/access to the appropriate information but may not have had the shared collaborative giving process of actually editing the encyclopedia in their spare time (between work/family/school/other responsibilities). Nothing can substitute for the experiences of making a few hundred edits on Wikipedia for understanding the perspective, the diversity of ideas, the shared values, etc.
Jim