How would locking Wikipedia down fulfill the mission to collect all the educational information known. Information changes constantly, new information becomes available constantly, and new material gets added to old articles constantly. I myself just added some new detail to an article within the past week.
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Damian peter.damian@btinternet.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thu, Sep 16, 2010 12:07 pm Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?
Putting this in context. If I were to donate, say £1,500 of gross income to MF, it would be reasonable to ask what this money was for: how it was elping. The WMF goal is to "collect and developing educational content and o disseminate it effectively and globally". Wikipedia is the main engine f this project, and is the reason I imagine most people want to donate oney. Would I donate such a sum of money if I thought that it was not ctually helping develop educational content? Hence my question: has ikipedia actually changed since 2005? Has any educational content been dded (I am not including porn star bios as educational content, clearly). I had three answers: 1. The first that this was seriously off-topic. I don't understand why ot. 2. The second compared Wikipedia to going to the barbers, getting a nice rim, and then the hair getting all messy again. That is clearly not a eason for donating money, quite the reverse. How is the money actually oing to help, if it all is going to be a mess again in 6 months? I ppreciate a lot of it goes to support the servers and IT and things, but ouldn't it be more efficient simply to stop people editing, clear up some f the mess, and lock Wikipedia down? That would be much cheaper. And I ould be willing to fund a clean-up effort. 3. I wasn't quite sure of Phil Nash's objection, I think he was trying to ay that there is no evidence of Wikipedia failing to develop or grow. To hat, I say that if I am going to donate money, I would like clear evidence hat Wikipedia is progressing in the direction I would hope. I would like to point out I do support a number of charities. I help the arburg institute with its library acquisition fund. This makes hard-to-get ooks available to students. I don't support WMF, and I won't until there s clear evidence the money would be used for a good purpose. What do thers think? Why do people donate to WMF? Peter
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