Re: [Wikimedia-l] FreeBSD fate and the lesson for Wikimedia movement

The news from today is that FreeBSD didn't succeed to gather enough money during their annual fundraising [1][2]. Badass suggestion would be that they should ask now Apple for funds. But, I'll try to keep chortle for myself and remain serious for the rest of this email. First of all, FreeBSD is a part of our broader movement and Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia chapters should find a way how to help them. I suppose that Mozilla Foundation could be also interested in this venture. Thus, I'd ask WMF and relevant chapters (those who have money) to organize themselves, contact Mozilla and see how to help FreeBSD community. I know that it's not a straight-forward action, but it's manageable.

If necessary, you can send email to me and I'll connect all interested Wikimedia [and surrounding] organizations. (And, please, don't ask me "Why should we help them?".) Second, and more important for ourselves: this is very strong message to us. Obviously, that's not because our content isn't licensed under a copyleft license. While I could appreciate FreeBSD folk's ethical position that free content should be free without any limit; while I could tolerate their flirt with proprietary software vendors; it proved that their strategy is bad for themselves. In short, they rely on their usefulness without having any defense. The question of [the type of] content license was the question of 1990s and early 2000s. Wikipedia solved that issue at the very beginning of its existence. But, strategic flaws are not limited on choosing the license. There are many of them and every new epoch brings their own possibilities to make them. I can see that we are in similar position now as FreeBSD was during the late 1990s. Good news is that it's likely that we have ~15 more years to change things. Bad news is that we are already at least five years behind our competition. And our competition are not various online encyclopedias -- not one as large and as relevant as Wikipedia. Our competition are top Internet sites, which are taking away the attention of our users. Fortunately, no top Internet site has enough of imagination to create viable collaborative educational project of Wikipedia size. (BTW, they have courage to do that -- Google Knol was the best try. Fortunately.) Fortunately, we don't have serious competitor outside of our broader movement (we don't have it inside, neither, but that wouldn't be so bad news; actually, bad news is that we don't have internal competitor yet).

Unfortunately, although existing, our steps toward making Wikimedia projects more attractive to new generations are so small, that it's hard to see them. I am happy to see that we finally got two new projects: Wikidata and Wikivoyage. That's, for sure, the step in the right direction and the first fresh blood after six years. However, our fate won't be much different from FreeBSD's if our main strategies are to repeat the pattern (Wikivoyage) or to do some really cool things for very limited population (including myself, of course; I am really excited with Wikidata). Our strategy should be contemporary. And, yes, that means social networking and gaming features. And, no, they don't have to be dumb.

[1]

[2] http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l