Jimmy Wales wrote:
Robin Shannon wrote:
I just don't think it is our role to deal with the problems of Africa and any of the other projects envisioned.
Could be a bit more clear about what projects you think are being envisioned which are not about our core mission? I ask, because I am unaware of any.
Our "core mission" is pretty broad, so probably most of the differencees of opinion are over what part of that mission we ought to be spending the most effort on.
I personally think that by far the most important part of our core mission should be to produce a Free (as in Freedom) compendium of human knowledge, and that there should be a core organization dedicated solely to that task with no other distracting/ancillary tasks.
That's not to say nothing else needs to get done, but it doesn't all need to be done by the *same* core organization. My main worry is that if there is one giant organization, and actually producing the encyclopedia becomes a focus of only a minority of its budget and paid staff, that will not improve its quality. It will also prevent Wikipedians from being able to pick and choose which other projects they support or don't support; instead they'll have to make one binary decision to "support Wikimedia" or not.
For example, if an African organization (preferably run by actual Africans, not Europeans and Americans) thought Wikipedia would be useful in some guise (perhaps CD-ROMs in schools; perhaps paper encyclopedias) and wanted to distribute it for that purpose, I would strongly support that, would donate to the organization, and would support acting on any reasonable requests for changes on the content-production end that would make their job easier.
That's not to say that it's impossible to have one organization do both or that any possible organization doing both would turn out horribly, but I think it's a worse arrangement and don't support it, which seems to me at least a reasonable opinion (of course, it's my claim, so I would think so).
In any case, that sort of thing is already happening to some extent with the German paper version, which I see as a positive sign.
-Mark