On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com wrote:
It was also unwise at this juncture for some individuals to remind concerned volunteers of how severely limited their formal power is within Foundation bylaws, because in a friendly relationship nobody actually exercises the limits of their formal powers. Bylaws notwithstanding, the volunteers wield great power here - more so than in almost any nonprofit:
*WMF is a provider of content, but its content is entirely copyleft.
Depending on how you interpret "provider"... The editors provide the content. The WMF owns the servers that host it. The WMF makes the content available to the general public.
*WMF runs on powerful software, which is also copyleft.
The Wikimedia Foundation does not run on any software. Its projects do :)
*WMF is almost entirely dependent upon volunteer labor for its content.
Right.
*WMF is not particularly well funded: it has no endowment, no contingency fund, and would shut its doors in less than half a year if donations disappeared.
Probably... which brings me to your next comment:
So long as the volunteers who fund WMF and provide its content remain content, there is no realistic danger that they will bring the full import of these facts to bear.
With all due respect, and I might be wrong in my interpretation of your sentence, but... the volunteers who provide content and the people who fund (donate) the projects are, I believe, two different sets of people. While there are donors who are editors and vice versa, we need to be aware that the donors are way more numerous than the editors (thankfully). Not to mention the number of our readers, which in turn is more important than that of our donors (unfortunately ;-) ). In short, thinking the power resides in the hands of the actual editors and only them is, in my opinion, a shortcut we should not indulge in. 20 million and (even lots of) volunteers ready to go "somewhere else" does not make a new Wikipedia. The real power resides in the synergy of it all. The volunteers, the readers, the donors.
Delphine