Pete Forsyth wrote:
... there are very good reasons to be cautious about how much and what kind of advocacy the Wikimedia Foundation engages in, but by and large, the reasons are not *legal* ones. They're related to our vision, our mission, our strategic plan, and our model of community governance.
Any new set of potential advocacy topics based on no editor growth instead of exponential editor growth should be reviewed for legality, compatibility with vision and mission, but not strategy or governance, because choices made for those topics are necessarily influenced by the volunteer growth rate. Thereby circular dependency in reasoning can be avoided. If someone implies that some of them are illegal or incompatible with vision or mission without saying which ones or why, then I generally don't take them seriously. People have had plenty of time to raise specific objections for specific reasons, and over time the extent to which they have or have not becomes significant. And I agree with James Alexander's concern about spreading effort too thin, which is why I've been trying to encourage ranking the combined set at http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft which has been picking up a little lately.
So I hope the Foundation will survey an accurately representative cross-section of volunteers to find their relative preferences on a set of advocacy topics which assumes no editor growth instead of exponential editor growth. Any such survey would have design trade-offs involving how much to weigh preferences by volunteer effort, and I very much want to move on to that topic, except for the fact that it should be possible to collect that data and decide later by looking at how different rankings turn out. Which may be the only way to do it, because I can't figure out how to decide how much more important someone's opinion should be if they've made thousands of edits compared to someone who's made a dozen. I will raise that question on wiki-research-l when I come up with something that feels like a reasonable answer two it, or a week or two if I can't. But again, the Foundation can do this and should do it. Luckily community volunteers can do it to, so if there is ever any question about fraud or misconduct, that can be audited by the community, which is what open collaborative editing is supposed to be about.
Best regards, James Salsman