On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 9:25 AM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi community members,
I'm wondering how many people might be interested in having an IRC meeting regarding the community's relationship to WMF and potentially developing our own strategic plan that would be independent of WMF. In the past few days I've heard some defense of WMF but mainly criticism and pessimism, especially people recalling past hurts and feeling powerless to negotiate with WMF. Perhaps it's time that we in the community create our own strategic plan and develop strategic options.
Please note that this would be a long-term planning meeting and we are not likely to make major decisions, but we would start brainstorming and laying some foundations.
Topics of possible discussion regarding our relationship with WMF:
- Strategic options, such as finding alternative organizations to WMF for
hosting Wikimedia sites or creating a new hosting organization that is aligned with community values.
I think this isn't as mad as it may sound. It seems some editors of the English Wikipedia have a strong dislike for many of the WMF decisions, and distrust the WMF staff to make the calls that are best for our shared goals, and vice versa. It's been often said that competition would be good for the project. It would lead to duplicated effort, yes. It also gives the opportunity to learn from each other. I have always believed, and I still believe, that the success of English Wikipedia hinges on the ability of the community to generate content, and that that's the absolutely most important part of English Wikipedia - all else, including consumption by end users - follows from that. A fork where one project is more content creation focused, and one more end-user presentation focused, with strong cooperation between the two projects would IMO be absolutely great. Who has the keys to the servers is less important IMO (which also keeps the option open for an "in-house fork").
As an aside, I don't think there is such a thing as "community values". I sincerely doubt there is even such a thing as a "community", or "community consensus", even for a single project (though it might (still) exist for smaller projects), and certainly not for the WikiMedia movement as a whole.
-- Martijn