Hi SJ,

Re " Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose derivatives of our work." Not an easy task when work is licenced Share Alike and By Attribution. But yes it is a real threat, and should be one that both the WMF and the volunteer community can agree to combat. For the WMF unattributed reuse reduces clickthroughs and thereby potential donations. For some volunteers not being credited for the work you contribute reduces motivation, for others it increases the difficulty of avoiding circular referencing. Especially when Wikipedia winds up citing as a source an article copied from a page on Wikipedia that has itself been deleted.

Attribution and share alike are at times a pain to comply with, and I fear that there are those in the movement who see this feature as a bug, and that this contributed to the use of CC0 on Wikidata.

But the opportunity is still there. The WMF could employ some legal staff, or fund a legal charity, that would strongly encourage reusers to respect the CC-BY-SA licence. This would protect the work people have done from being  used to derive works that are neither attributed nor shared alike. It would protect WMF revenue, maintain volunteer motivation and make it difficult to "enclose derivatives of our work.

Employing a few dozen legals and paralegals in a country such as India could make a real difference to this, and at least partially address the issues others have raised about the lack of WMF spending in developing countries.

WSC

Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:48:12 -0400
From: Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com>
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity?
To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Message-ID:
        <CAAtU9WL5yFXyArg5qpRr1wtwXQSq=010mhZa4YJ4+Shhy4HZ=Q@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
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We face the paradox <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox> of
choice <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice>, the lull of peace, and
the fog of distributed bureaucracy.
~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!)
~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing
over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and
companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to
an end.
~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to
baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by
some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.

Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at
scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it.  Building some of the
world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit,
experience, and budget.
  [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support +
spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]

Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that
can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and
aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing
almost as well.

SJ

*^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into
otherwise continuous processes.  This ratio can slip into the negative if
one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out
comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for
little result.
🌍🌏🌎🌑

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <
galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the
> money can go to that effort.
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Felipe Schenone <schenonef@gmail.com>
> *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM
> *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
>
> I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia
> is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it, there's
> probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process to
> decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving
> indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable,
> considering the alternatives.
>
> Here are some ideas:
>
> * Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
> * Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki depends.
> * Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
> far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
> * Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land for
> a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and generalize
> the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
>
> On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM <tim.herb@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of
> people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It
> is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas at
> the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency that
> needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then a
> lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With
> increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is an
> usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and
> do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the
> needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia
> Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in
> the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do
> not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are
> currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I
> think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the
> Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sessions,_FY2021-22
>
> Hogü-456
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