geni wrote:

On 30 March 2013 20:57, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

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(A) Should the Foundation devote banner space on project home pages to CISPA advocacy?[3][4]

(B) Should the Foundation devote banner space on project home pages to CALEA advocacy?[5]

(C) Should the Foundation devote banner space on project home pages to CFAA advocacy?[6]

No since none of those have any impact on our core issues.

I disagree. All of those measures represent various forms of government intrusion likely to change editor behaviors in a way which can reasonably be expected to degrade article quality and comprehensiveness.

Oliver Keyes wrote:

On 30 March 2013 20:57, James Salsman <jsalsman at gmail.com> wrote:

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As a more specific practical reformulation of this question, how bad would poverty in developed countries have to become before it would be appropriate for the Foundation to advocate on the issue? Is it already appropriate? Would it only be appropriate if the proportion of editors leaving the project due to personal poverty was increasing? Would it never be appropriate?

Speaking personally: ... It would, practically speaking, never be appropriate for us to spend page impressions or chunks of page impressions on this kind of advocacy - I say "practically" because, while things might alter slightly if it turned out editors were leaving in droves due to poverty, this seems...'ludicrously unlikely' doesn't cover it.

I presume that this opinion doesn't have any actual data behind it. Here is some actual data, from the county where I went to school:

"The school system, which keeps the best records of homelessness in the county, says the number of homeless students rose from 59 in 2001 to 2,812 in the current school year." -- http://prospect.org/article/weeklies

So there you have an example of students who would otherwise likely join in the pool of potential editors in the developed world. Over the period of time that Wikipedia has existed, they have become far less likely to become editors because they have far less free time, less access to internet resources, less access to personal educational resources, and less financial capacity to perform ordinary tasks in support of editing such as travel to university libraries and obtaining specialist reference materials.

James, I appreciate that you care a lot about these issues. But please stop trying to use the movement as your personal soapbox.

When poverty increases in the developed world, the demand for my customers' products increases in the developing world. Over the past six years, the extent to which this has happened has far surpassed and entirely supplanted my income as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. I resent the insinuation that I am doing anything for myself by showing the connections between poverty and the health of the editor community, when in fact the opposite is true.

Sincerely, James Salsman