Potato potato - availability can be interpreted in many different ways. Thanks to the free license, we've covered a big part of that by design.
What activities the WMF should be doing wasn't quite the core of the discussion though, but rather how big the WMF should be.
Lodewijk
On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 5:00 PM, Tim Landscheidt tim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
(anonymous) wrote:
[…]
But 'getting big' is maybe not the most important thing in the world. Working on our mission, is. And part of that, is security. The WMF is not in this world to play the odds, but rather to ensure that knowledge is freed, and stays free - most specifically by securing Wikipedia's
continued
availability (at least, that is what our deck of cards looks like now).
Fully focussing on one sigle stream of money may indeed allow you to get more out of it. But the question here is rather, how to you tackle the situation when that stream dries up? And for that question,
diversification
is actually key.
[…]
I don't agree with that. From the Library of Alexandria to the Duchess Anna Amalia Library it has always been a mistake to keep knowledge in one place and try really hard to keep it from falling apart. The biggest advancement in that field probably came from Gutenberg's press which allowed knowledge to be spread around and resist attempts of censor- ship.
When cinema and television came along, the ancient pattern repeated: Cultural goods are lost today because the broad- casters put them in one vault and then did not maintain the fire alarm properly.
We have the same issue now with streaming services: During dictatorships, you could hide books and jazz records. Net- flix or YouTube just stops serving videos some entity does not like, and Amazon can wipe your Kindle clean of anything.
So the diversification for the purpose of the advancement of knowledge should not lie in making WMF immortal, but ensur- ing that it survives WMF's death.
Tim
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