On 13 March 2014 11:32, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Mostly, though....this just really feels like it is trying to take the Wikimedia community down a path that has nothing to do with our core objectives, and to turn us into just another advocacy group. I'm not interested in that.
+1
The Convention on the Rights of the Child is a good and important thing, and I would certainly agree that the two nations which have somehow neglected to ratify it should certainly be strongly encouraged to do so...
...but I would strongly oppose WMF being the vehicle for such domestic political campaigning. It's simply not what it's for. Likewise the appearance of tax policy or education funding.
On much the same basis, I would be uncomfortable with Greenpeace being persuaded to act as a spokesman for net neutrality, or for UNICEF to suddenly start aggressively campaigning against whaling. All good topics, but they should have other priorities.
The underlying argument here seems to be "these things are important and indirectly affect the work we do or might do". However, were we to follow this to its logical end, we should campaign to shut down about half the world's charities and redirect all their funds to researching asteroid deflection...