On 3/5/07, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote: [snip
If a volunteer strongly believes in the work of the foundation, has shown commitment to the project through positions of trust, has shown that they will do at least X hours a day, and has assumed much responsibility then I think they could be trusted with a position.
Even so, it's hard to put in what you'd like to put in when you have another full-time obligation.
There are some volunteers whom have been able to volunteer for Wikimedia without other full time obligations, but they are few and far between and are not a scalable solution for our needs.
Furthermore, 40 people spending an hour to solve one problem is not equal to 1 person spending 40 hours. 40 people have the advantage of a broader perspective, but they fail in almost every other regard. A great many problems would be far better solved with 40 people for 10 minutes and one person for 20 hours....
Time input vs results for complex tasks is non-linear and I suspect that the majority of our long term volunteers don't put in enough time to get out of the you-lose section of the curve. This might explain the over abundance we have in people doing patrolling for obvious vandalism vs more complex 'quality checking' work like sourcing.
I agree, there are some critical jobs with time-sensitivity that cannot be left to volunteers, but volunteers should be used as extensively as possible.
I think everyone would agree on that last point. We might just disagree where the tradeoff point for volunteers is...