Re: [Foundation-l] Volunteer Appreciation

Steven, You're welcome. There's also this, which I still long to turn into a proper report with excerpts and screenshots : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WQ/Retro You are right that wikipedia has a website-product as one of its major outputs. And the focus on this important large-scale product has helped channel energies into a common goal. But I wouldn't say that any set of products alone embodies the essential idea. If we can get every person on earth connected to an overview of the world's knowledge, contributing the things they have to teach, and reviewing the things they care about, the ongoing process and project that involves would be more important to me (and to my view of WM) than the constellation of products -- web & mobile references, search & question interfaces, offline & printed collections, talmudically annotative widgets -- that would exist. If you see WM as a collection of static products, then sure, you could find other ways to produce that... and you implicitly are embracing certain limitations on scale. If you see it as a community of 100k people, more like the fabled city, laying its Foundations within a community 10,000 times larger -- well, then you have your own culture, an engine for future growth, a destination for those not yet part of it. Describing a city by its monuments is fine for a tourist guide [and to attract new residents], but those monuments don't define it, nor are the reason for its reason for existence or (one hopes) its most lasting legacy. SJ On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 2:00 PM, Steven Walling <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote: