can someone kill this thread? Thanks.
2009/9/13 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
2009/9/13 Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com:
On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
wrote:
Wow, that's... pretty offensive, actually.
If you are offended by statements of fact, that is your problem.
I think it's fairly clear that I dispute the factualness of your
statement.
You take offence when people say something you deem to be mistaken? Or are you suggesting I knew what I said was untrue and said it to be intentionally malicious?
Last time I checked, being a non-profit (and a charity if possible) *was* a requirement to be a Wikimedia chapter. The WMF does have experience of running a charity.
I don't know when it was that you checked, because this has never been a requirement. In countries where there's some analog to what Americans and Brits would call a non-profit, that's generally the desired form, but different countries have different legal systems—WMF Inc., for instance, is not a "charity" in the American sense of the word—and we do now have chapters which are neither.
I've looked it up, and I stand corrected - non-profit status is on the "guideline" page, not the "requirements" page. I knew I had seen it there somewhere.
That's not even the point, however. WMF Inc. does not have experience running a non-profit in, say, Brunei. I couldn't tell you the exchange rate in Brunei, much less what it costs to organize an event there. It's preposterous to assume that we can step in and throw highly paid western consultants at a situation, with the poor, incompetent Bruneians bowing to our superior wisdom and experience.
If the WMF doesn't know what is appropriate and the local chapter people can be trusted to know what is appropriate (in some cases the local chapter may have the necessary experience and the WMF can defer to their expertise, but that isn't always the case), then the WMF needs to do the necessary research. They are responsible for what money that people have given them is spent on, so it falls to them to find out what spending is and isn't appropriate.
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