On 12/28/06, Dedalus dedalus@wikipedia.be wrote:
Tomorrow the Virgin Unite will not longer be present as a sitenotice. Today jeroen and others complained about that sitenotice. In his words the community would have been split. The current fundraiser raises today an additional several 100k US dollar, so that is gain one. Concerning the Dutch Wikipedia, today over 250 persons registered a username. So the Dutch Wikipedia today gains that many new users and maybe loose temporarily (I doubt definitely) one or two well known users.
For both numbers one can doubt if they are permanent. But the one swho have gone are mainly old hands, experienced contributors who have the core values of wikipedia at heart.
The new ones will mainly have arrived because of the 250,000 article milestone, the press release hit the media today. Many of the new wikipedians will never write even 1 article.
Somebody else mentioned the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It's in the
press they would like to raise the level of primary and secondary education in the US. Wikiversity and or Wikibooks might be helpful in raising the level of education there and elsewhere. Suppose the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would like to grant some money to WMF on the condition that it would be for specific projects, e.g. Wikibooks or Wikiversity, would that raise any objections by anyone?
In short, I believe Brad Patrick and his team are doing a perfect job to keep the WMF and the websites up and running.
Dedalus _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l