Hoi,
You are entitled to an opinion and you may voice it and so am I. The
Wikimedia Foundation is not a democracy and neither is our movement. This
was done with deliberation. At best our movement is represented in the
board and through its chapters. In essence the main function of the WMF is
to ensure that the servers serve. That they serve optimally. As a
consequence they maintain the code base of MediaWiki and associated
software. As a result there have been several improvements in the
responsiveness of the software. There have been improvements in the amount
of energy our servers use. And frankly, that is their business and it is
none of the business of the community. It is their business because it
translates in the amount the servers take to serve, in the amount it takes
to transport the data and in the amount of energy to display it on a
screen. This reduces costs and it is a good investment as improvements will
serve us well as we move forward. It is also a fiduciary duty of the
Foundation to use the monies it gets well
Given that our movement is not a democracy, I find it operates very much in
a democratic way. At that it functions remarkably well representing the
needs of our communities particularly when you compare it with some nation
states. The Foundation serves its purpose well and even though I am well
known to be critical, if you care to, you will find that I am supportive of
what the Foundation does in the big picture. It is impossible to make
everybody happy and, it does imho a good job within the parameters of what
is possible to them. That includes people in a community who feel abandoned
when they are told to share "their" toys.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 at 00:36, Yuri Astrakhan <yuriastrakhan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Gerard, you assume that "my wikipedia" is
the only project I participate
in? Let me assure you this is not the case. On the contrary, the last few
years I mostly contributed to Wikidata and recently - a massive Wiktionary
lexeme import, and very little to Wikipedia.
That said, I think removing the last actionable and visible community check
on WMF is a mistake for the reasons I outlined before. We the community
(people who contribute to the open knowledge, who actually created the
knowledge that now generates all those donations) should have at least some
measurable input into how WMF spends those resources and priorities its
projects. WMF can say "we believe that free knowledge means we must spend
99% of the donations towards global warming, because one cannot have free
knowledge without the planet on which to live" (a bit of a straw man
argument, but it illustrates my point) -- and there is no community input
short of a Global protect or a Spanish-wiki-style revolt where the whole
community decides to move to a different platform for the feedback to get
across.
My point is -- in a democracy, if a large crowd is on the streets, the
government has already messed up. And the way to avoid it is to have a well
functioning feedback mechanism that can early-on tell WMF what the
"constituents" would like it to do. We currently do NOT have any way for
donators to say what they want the money to be spend on. We currently do
NOT have any way for community to do the same. Thus, its a self-driving
ship -- the inmates are running the asylum.
On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 12:50 AM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com
wrote:
The disappointing you show and the grotesque
conclusions are imho based
in
a sense of entitlement. You had it your way for
so long and they are now
robbing you from your cookies... It is easy to "forget" that a program
where a majority decides what is on a "community wish list" favours the
biggest projects. It is easy to forget that the WMF has many projects and
your Wikipedia is only one out of over 250 and, there are the "other"
projects as well.
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