Pete Forsyth wrote:
... there are very good reasons to be cautious about how much
and what kind of advocacy the Wikimedia Foundation engages
in, but by and large, the reasons are not *legal* ones. They're
related to our vision, our mission, our strategic plan, and our
model of community governance.
Any new set of potential advocacy topics based on no editor growth
instead of exponential editor growth should be reviewed for legality,
compatibility with vision and mission, but not strategy or governance,
because choices made for those topics are necessarily influenced by
the volunteer growth rate. Thereby circular dependency in reasoning
can be avoided. If someone implies that some of them are illegal or
incompatible with vision or mission without saying which ones or why,
then I generally don't take them seriously. People have had plenty of
time to raise specific objections for specific reasons, and over time
the extent to which they have or have not becomes significant. And I
agree with James Alexander's concern about spreading effort too thin,
which is why I've been trying to encourage ranking the combined set at
http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft
which has been picking up a little lately.
So I hope the Foundation will survey an accurately representative
cross-section of volunteers to find their relative preferences on a
set of advocacy topics which assumes no editor growth instead of
exponential editor growth. Any such survey would have design
trade-offs involving how much to weigh preferences by volunteer
effort, and I very much want to move on to that topic, except for the
fact that it should be possible to collect that data and decide later
by looking at how different rankings turn out. Which may be the only
way to do it, because I can't figure out how to decide how much more
important someone's opinion should be if they've made thousands of
edits compared to someone who's made a dozen. I will raise that
question on wiki-research-l when I come up with something that feels
like a reasonable answer two it, or a week or two if I can't. But
again, the Foundation can do this and should do it. Luckily community
volunteers can do it to, so if there is ever any question about fraud
or misconduct, that can be audited by the community, which is what
open collaborative editing is supposed to be about.
Best regards,
James Salsman