On Fri, Jul 9, 2021 at 11:17 PM Dggenwp <dggenwp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The projects are the route by which content is added
to Wikipedia. The purpose of Wikipedia is not to have an organisation—the purpose is to
have and distribute free content. Everything else is superstructure—everything except the
individual volunteers and the projects. This superstructure can be important, but not
essential — the volunteers are capable of organising themselves and maintaining the
projects. The foundation by itself is capable of almost nothing, as it doesn’t add
content. The chapters are of value, primarily in recruiting contributors—without that,
they’d just be social clubs.
The volunteers and the projects to which they add content are what matters. The three key
functions of the organisation are maintaining MediaWiki (but that’s a volunteer effort
also) in raising the small amount of essential funding, and the critically important
political work of supporting freedom of the internet and of speech more generally. But our
influence for this is because people in the world use the content the volunteers add to
the projects. The structure must be organised around them. We are here to build an
encyclopaedia.
Without wish to argue against anything of what you wrote (can
certainly agree with orientation), I would add (somewhat in your
style) that this is 2021 and Wikimedia sister projects have also their
own dynamics as well as playing part in the larger ecosystem of open
knowledge, code, media, information, but also related dissemination,
development, deployment, publication, participation, coordination,
collaboration, education, preservation and other types of work that is
non-encyclopedic.
Btw it is a good practice not to speak for everyone, even when this is
partial truth, as it is not the only and nothing but the truth for
everyone here ;-)
Best Z.