I'm hoping I'm not understanding this criticism:
' that it is unduly oriented to topics of interest to the masses",'
Are you stating that Peter is stating that a general encyclopedia should not be oriented to topics of interest to the masses? Who exactly is the audience if not the masses?
-----Original Message----- From: Nathan nawrich@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, Sep 16, 2010 12:59 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.com> wrote: Putting this in context. If I were to donate, say £1,500 of gross income to WMF, it would be reasonable to ask what this money was for: how it was helping. The WMF goal is to "collect and developing educational content and to disseminate it effectively and globally". Wikipedia is the main engine of this project, and is the reason I imagine most people want to donate money. Would I donate such a sum of money if I thought that it was not actually helping develop educational content? Hence my question: has Wikipedia actually changed since 2005? Has any educational content been added (I am not including porn star bios as educational content, clearly).
I had three answers:
1. The first that this was seriously off-topic. I don't understand why not.
2. The second compared Wikipedia to going to the barbers, getting a nice trim, and then the hair getting all messy again. That is clearly not a reason for donating money, quite the reverse. How is the money actually going to help, if it all is going to be a mess again in 6 months? I appreciate a lot of it goes to support the servers and IT and things, but wouldn't it be more efficient simply to stop people editing, clear up some of the mess, and lock Wikipedia down? That would be much cheaper. And I would be willing to fund a clean-up effort.
3. I wasn't quite sure of Phil Nash's objection, I think he was trying to say that there is no evidence of Wikipedia failing to develop or grow. To that, I say that if I am going to donate money, I would like clear evidence that Wikipedia is progressing in the direction I would hope.
I would like to point out I do support a number of charities. I help the Warburg institute with its library acquisition fund. This makes hard-to-get books available to students. I don't support WMF, and I won't until there is clear evidence the money would be used for a good purpose. What do others think? Why do people donate to WMF?
Peter
eter, a few points. You misunderstood my comment, but I'll let that go. People who donate to Wikimedia do so for a number of reasons, chief mong them (I suspect) is to support keeping the lights on. That is, he ongoing maintenance of the project in its current form. Most onors are probably aware that the content is generated by volunteers ho will not receive donated funds. I'm not sure why you infer that onors are, or should be, expecting to see some content improvement as result of their funding. A related point is that the Wikimedia rojects are not just fancy concepts that might be useful someday down he road; they are highly useful right now, which is why they have een used by hundreds of millions of people. Finally, cherry picking a few articles to determine if the English ncyclopedia has improved in the last 5 years is not exactly an nalytically robust method. I suspect any such method would find that here has been an enormous increase in both the volume and the quality f content since 2005. You are, and have been, committed to several conclusions about ikipedia - that the idea of an editable encyclopedia itself is atally flawed, that it is unduly oriented to topics of interest to the masses", and that the community and its bureaucracy are hopefully orrupt and ineffective. That, combined with an absolute disregard for ommunity norms and rules, makes you both a steadfast and imperfect ritic. So I don't imagine anyone expects you to donate or is urprised that you don't. Few banned editors do. Nathan _______________________________________________ oundation-l mailing list oundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org nsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l