On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 4:09 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: If we are talking about money, the potential value of Wikimedia is far more than $7 billions. As an organized cultural movement in the near future its value will be at the level of one country with 10-20 millions of inhabitants.

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 5:11 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: This problem is also related to the positioning of the Board members. We have an NGO and a global cultural movement. And Board members should decide are they willing to lead NGO, global cultural movement or both. There are know-hows for all three options. The worst choice is the position: I want my NGO and it is very cool to have a global cultural movement behind my NGO.

Milos Rancic hett schreven: If Wikipedia is worth 7 billions at the moment, that would mean, every article is worth (we hit 10 million articles some time ago) some 700 dollars. Oh my god! If I idiot wouldn't have released my articles under fucking GFDL and if I instead had sold them on the free market, I could be a millionaire! I should stop contributing to Wikipedia at once ;-) And translate it into the country thing: That means I could reign over my own country with more inhabitants than the Vatican! King Marcus I. of Buckonia! Nice dreams ;-) Marcus Buck

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 9:50 PM, Marcus Buck <me(a)marcusbuck.org> wrote: Thomas told you about a synergy. The other issue is related to the significance of Wikimedian projects: they are maybe the most important foundation of this generation of humans to the future generations. And this is only in the sense of knowledge, without counting any other aspect of Wikimedia (which are maybe at the same level of significance). If things will continue to go *ordinary*, which means that the Board and the rest of the community don't make big mistakes, which, also, means that we should do right things from time to time (for example, organizing community inside of the chapters is one of such right things), it will mean: - Through time, more and more people will be willing to give big donations to the Wikimedia (not only to WMF, but to the chapters and similar organizations in the future). This is a very important issue for those (formal) organizations: If someone decides to donate now a big house to WM Serbia, I am almost sure that WM Serbia wouldn't be able to accept it (and it seems that the same applies for WM UK); while WM DE will be able to accept such gift. However, I am sure that even WMF and all chapters together wouldn't be able to accept such gift if the house is, let's say, in Brazil, while if it is in Spain we would need a lot of efforts to take the gift. - In this moment I am able to go to Zagreb and feel like I am at home only because I am a Wikimedian. This may be applied for a lot of Wikimedians at different meridians. - In a decade or two we will have almost the same number of offices in different countries as UN has. A visible benefit of having such number of offices for ordinary Wikimedians is that they will be able to meet people with whom they share the same values all over the world. But, more important benefit will be a strong network (in this moment we have a not so strong network [of contributors]) of people dedicated to free knowledge based on scientific values (and, unlike existing scientific networks, our network is not partialized to branches). Synergy (again) of this network may generate the most important global cultural movement in the history. (And this is not because other ideas in the history were not great, but because we have a much better tool for communication, the Interent, now.) - And back to the money. If we are talking about long term consequences (50-100 years), it is not possible to count the value in money. However, influence of such movement will be not based just at the fact of owning Wikipedia, but much more based on a number and quality of people involved in the movement. And in a decade or two it will be comparable with a country with 10-20 millions of inhabitants. If everything goes *ordinary*. - There is one more extremely important issue. There is no other similar phenomenon in the world. Without Wikimedia we wouldn't have any grass-roots movement which aims to gather people for their common interest, not only related to free knowledge. This fact brings to all of us extremely high responsibility. (And, btw, from time to time I am really feeling a little bit frustrated because I have an impression (maybe wrong?) that a lot of Wikimedians don't see those facts and very predictable future trends, very obvious to me.) I realize that it is hard to the Board members to deal with such level of responsibility when they need to think would they have enough of money for tickets for Board meeting or so. But, I am sure that the most of other people who are participating in foundation-l discussions or just reading our emails -- are ready to help. Transparent work is sometimes very hard, but this is the only possible way for building mutual understanding, which is more than necessary if we are willing to take the responsibility which we achieved by our work.