Hi Craig, Amir, and Nat,
On 2016-02-19 00:13, Craig Franklin wrote:
Yaroslav,
You're correct in that most volunteers don't care directly. The problem is that a lot of the BoT's recent difficulties have crossed the line from "angry encyclopedia people venting on a mailing list" to "serious and negative attention from the mainstream press". If there is too much of the latter, it may create a perception amongst the general public than even if Wikipedia is a useful resource, that it is incompetent with handling money. As a result, donations dry up, and difficult and unpleasant choices have to be made around budget.
So yes, this sort of thing can influence rank and file editors most seriously, albeit indirectly.
Cheers, Craig
Whereas you are absolutely right, I actually have two very simple points.
One is that in the big picture, servers were running ten years ago on a budget which is thousand times less than the current WMF budget. And unless someone screws up badly they would still be running in ten years from now. Most people use the servers to see content, and most of them want to look up the English Wikipedia. People who add this content - volunteers - are largely independent of the funding, and the vast majority of them do not even know that WMF exists. Sure, it would be very unfortunate to lose the development momentum, to lose GLAMS and similar things, but this is kind of luxury. Volunteers large live not because WMF screws up or because funding dries out; they leave because they burn out, move to a different period in their life, or, well, die. My point is that even if funding is severely reduced, it would be very unfortunate, but this is not yet the end of the world.
The second one refers to Leila's statement that she is more afraid for volunteers than for the staff. My point is that actually staff (including Leila herself) which suffer most from the ongoing disruption, and if one needs to protect someone (I am not sure it is needed) it should be staff, not volunteers.
For the record, I do not have any opinion on who is right and who is wrong here. I do not have enough information, and I do not have a habit making uninformed statements. Again, in the big picture this is irrelevant; what is relevant is that some disruption is going on, which definitely has an impact on the movement.
Cheers Yaroslav