On 4 July 2014 01:00, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think it's a donation if you're getting something (a survey) in return.
How could the Foundation possibly not benefit from understanding contributors' opinions about general strategic goals for improving participation?
I also want development of accuracy review. If there are any reasons that the Foundation would not benefit from that, the survey, or a reflinks cache which includes enough room to fit a category adjacency map in, then please bring them to my attention.
The survey *again*? Oh, dear. It was a bad idea before, and it's still a bad idea when we're bribed into agreeing to it with hardware donations.
James, this is getting a bit sad to see. You've raised this idea of a political issues survey a dozen or more times on the mailing list over a couple of years, and the responses tend to be along the lines of "no, that's inappropriate" or "no, that's irrelevant", both from the community and from Foundation staffers; at least one person honestly seemed to think it was satirical!
I don't think these responses were particularly ambiguous, so it's a bit odd that you seem to think that people haven't clearly explained why it's a bad idea.
See, eg,
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-March/070583.html http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-April/070937.html
Almost every issue on that political survey is irrelevant to most of our work - I suppose you could make a case for "metropolitan broadband", which might be relevant - and irrelevant to the specific question of volunteer participation.
To take a straw poll on whether a few people in the community prefer "steeply progressive taxation" to "school class size reduction", and then use that as justification to divert resources into one or the other those topics, is frankly insulting to our donors and volunteers, who have signed up to support something entirely different and nothing to do with either of them. It also arrogantly presumes a lot about other people's political and economic beliefs which I find somewhat disquieting - why are you so confident that Wikipedians are *for* all of these things?
Wikimedia has a goal we have chosen to adopt and a general method we have developed to try and achieve it. That method does not involve engineering massive external changes in order to produce long-term second or third-order effects that *might*, in some undefined fashion, lead to incidental benefits towards the goal in a decade or three.
Those changes may be *good* in and of themselves - in most cases, I'd agree they would be, and I think our community would broadly tend to agree as well - but bringing them about is simply not what Wikimedia was set up to do and it's not what people have given money and time to support. Why not throw WMF's efforts at cancer treatment or clean-air programs? Or climate-change campaigns? All great things and need all the support they can get, and they'd probably have as much effect on user activity as data-centre energy efficiency... which is to say, very little direct impact.
Put it from the other perspective: we should try and work on (or at least identify!) things which might directly affect the problem of participation, rather than trying to solve all the world's political and economic issues and hoping our original problem will be a bit easier afterwards.
And, finally - the more you argue for this tangential idea, the more people are going to ignore any other (reasonable) suggestion you make.
I hope this (sadly lengthy) email constitutes bringing some minor objections to your attention.
Andrew.