On 5/29/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
What you seem to forget is that Wikipedia's strength rests with its amateurs. While there may be evident need for some amount of administrative staff it is as important to avoid pretensions of being a professional organization. If you look at staff as an investment you are assuming an economic model that runs contrary to Wikipedia's free nature.
But you can also make the case that getting professionals to do the work that needs to be done (legal, finance, fundraising, etc.) offloads those tasks so that the "strength of the amateurs" can be more productively tapped and scaled up to keep Wikipedia evolving in what it does best.
A lot of the problems with this (and many discussions on this list) is the misguided goal of trying to find The Way, or the "universal truth" as Delirium said, to do everything. Online or face to face? Amateur or professional? Volunteer or paid position? Bottom up or top down?
"You must err on the side of disorganization, or all is lost!"
Someone once described this as the "tyranny of wiki-fundamentalism." It's quite an accurate label. We should try moving beyond the fundamental belief that building a great online virtual encyclopedia automatically provides the formula for building a legally and financially responsible organization.
<troll> That said, it should be completely obvious to all that the new Wikimedia headquarters should be in... Hawaii, home of the wikiwiki. </troll>
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)