2009/4/30 Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)verizon.net>et>: How will these working groups be organised? Having a specific group working on something and having everything open to participation by everyone seem to be contradictory. Will there be a deadline to sign up to each group before it starts work, or will the groups not actually have a well-defined membership? Or do you have some other plan I haven't considered?

2009/4/30 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: Hi Thomas, We don't have answers to those questions yet :-) Basically, we (mostly Michael and I) will be designing the process over the next few months -- it's scheduled to kick off in July, and we'll be working through org structure, timelines, etc., between now and then. What you say is true: there is a fairly fundamental tension between openness and a structure designed to drive towards decisions. The fastest way to develop a strategy would be to have me and Michael create it alone in a room in a single day, or have Michael tell me what the strategy is, or have me recommend one to him. But it wouldn't necessarily be a very good strategy, and it certainly wouldn't be as good as what we can accomplish collectively :-) In a conventional organization, strategy development usually involves just the senior management team, sometimes including consultation with key stakeholders or experts. We obviously don't want to do it that way. Our strength is our openness, and our fundamental premise is that broad participation drives good decision quality. Many, many people have something to contribute -- be it a fact or piece of information, the ability to brainstorm, a contrarian view, the ability to reconcile divergent views, or a pointer towards expertise we don't currently have. That is true of the work that's done in the Wikimedia projects, and we think it also should be true for our strategy project. Having said that, we need some structure to ensure the work happens. The trick will be trying to design a process that strikes a good balance between total openness, and driving towards decision-making. It's my responsibility to try to find that balance :-) Here's a very quick sketch of the structure I am imagining right now: * A steering committee, made up of the board. The steering committee's job is to oversee the work, and make sure it's consistent with our core values. To evangelize on behalf of the project and support it, and to make hard decisions about priorities when necessary. * A project team made up of a small number of people accountable for driving the work forward, keeping it on track. I expect it would be mostly paid staff and paid support. It would be process-focused not substance-focused. * A small number of Working Groups, responsible for developing a set of strategic recommendations within a fairly broad scope. For example, we might have Working Groups on Reach, on Quality, on Participation. The Working Groups' job would be to evaluate and synthesize recommendations from the Sub-Groups, below. I do not think the people on the Working Groups would necessarily need to be experts in their area, but they would definitely need to be strategic thinkers, inclined towards convergence, and ideally with some expertise doing strategy work. * A larger number of Sub-Groups, with responsibility for developing recommendations that feed into those broader-scope Working Groups. For example, the Reach Working Group might have a Sub-Group focused on "reaching people with offline readers"; the Quality Working Group might have a Sub-Group focused on "freeing up archival/library/media content"; the Participation Working Group might have a Sub-Group focused on "attracting academics to participate in the projects." Those aren't necessarily the best examples, but I'm sure you get the idea. The people in the Sub-Groups will need, ideally, to have real subject-matter expertise, or be willing to work hard to get it where it's missing. * A small number of people supporting the process, and the groups, in various ways. That will include the Wikimedia Foundation staff, who will be available to the groups for advice and expertise as needed. It will also, I hope, include our Advisory Board members, who support our goals and are expert in various fields. And it will include three new paid positions -- short-term contracts designed to support this process. Those jobs will be posted within a week or so, and will include a Project Manager, a Research Analyst, and a Facilitator. (I'll post a note here when those jobs go up.) A couple of quick additional points: * The structure outlined above will simply address the "what" -- what we want the Wikimedia movement to accomplish together. It will not address the "how" --- big questions around how to structure ourselves to achieve this work, how to pay for it all, how to communicate our plans externally once they are developed, etc. I am thinking now about how to best address the "how" questions in this process. * I believe the Working Groups and Sub-Groups should be fairly small, in order to gel as a team and get the work done. Like, 4-6 people in each. And, the people in the groups will need to be able to dedicate quite a bit of time to the project, probably over a duration of several months. So, we will additionally need to create other mechanisms for involving additional people -- as experts who can be called upon by the groups, as reviewers to comment upon the work as it's being done, and in other roles. I am thinking now about what that might look like, and also about how to make the work of the groups as public and transparent as possible. (It is also probable that we'll aim to construct some surveys and other mechanisms for feedback, for people who don't have the time or inclination to really get involved, but who nonetheless would like to have some input.) * There is also a big question about languages. The work will need to be done in English, but we will also want to provide avenues for non-English-speakers to participate, other than through their own direct connections to people who do speak English. That will be hard. * I am also thinking about how best to involve the voices of readers -- the people who use our projects, but don't contribute to them. I think this is really important -- after all, the purpose of the projects is to freely provide information to people everywhere in the world, so it's critical that those people's differing opinions and attitudes and desires be well-understood. I am not yet sure how to make that happen. But I think that if the project were to end up ignoring Wikimedia readers, that would be a huge missed opportunity. Hope this helps a little. Please feel free (anyone) to comment on this: it's very much a work-in-progress, and your views are welcome :-) Thanks, Sue

2009/4/30 Sue Gardner <sgardner(a)wikimedia.org>rg>: May the IPU have mercy on your soul! That's one hell of a responsibility... I agree with pretty much everything you've said, the big question remaining is the one of how to get everyone that isn't on one of these small committees involved, and I'm glad I'm not the one that has to answer it! ;)

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 6:23 PM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Yes. Considering the stakes and our capacity for history, this seems to me appropriate and possible. < If the goal is creative communication, groups must be able to communicate effectively with one another. If we want to benefit from the excellent ideas everywhere in the community, an active translation nexus to ensure refined ideas are shared widely, and groups of great contributors brainstorming however is most effective for them (including, often, using their native language) is not unreasonable. Live meetings require single languages or simultaneous interpretation; extended deliberation can be more flexible. Sue's post covered committees and layered subgroups, some of no more than a few people. Certainly the right sort of diversity of participants in each major area of discussion and at each level of abstraction or scope is valuable, all else being equal -- say, diversity of language, interests and background, and type of contribution. And yet small groups will always cluster some qualities. SJ

Samuel Klein wrote: Personally on this scope, my personal burning priority would be off-planet database backups. And I am not joking, one bit, either. Not because disaster fears, but more fears of political kinds. I don't hold with the view that we can rest assured liberal democratic systems are inherently stable under all conceivable extra-political real world contexts. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:08 PM, phoebe ayers &lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Besides, this is a (slightly long) generation, which makes a useful human-scaled measure to think in. I really want my kids, at some point, to be able to say in exasperation, "Mom, this isn't *your* Wikipedia anymore!" Or better yet: "Grandma, we are sick and tired of hearing how you had to write your own markup, both ways in the snow! We edit through the power of our minds now, OK?! Sheesh!" -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers <at> gmail.com *

As someone who is relatively new to the Foundation's Board (just over a year now) and has been through this kind of strategic planning exercise a few times, I thought I'd share some thoughts: - There seems to be more agreement on a high-level vision ("every single human being can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge") in our community than in anything I've been a part of. And we're actually doing it -- last month one estimate had us bringing knowledge to over 325 million people around the world. That's not yet every single human being but wow, what a great start. - Despite that apparent high-level unity, it is very difficult to translate such a sweeping vision into a set of near-term priorities. - As we've grown and succeeded, we've attracted more donors (something like 135,000 in the last fundraiser) so now have greater financial resources to make investments and support the volunteers. - There are many things we could focus on: usability, quality, outreach in countries without chapters, language issues, technology scalability, performance, data center expansion, access for those with limited/no connectivity, legal/trademark/copyright protections, etc. - We can't do them all at the same time -- even with all our success we have limited money and volunteer energy. A strategic plan can help provide focus and prioritization. - The approach the Board and Sue have laid out -- widespread involvement from our entire community -- is unprecedented. Many organizations do strategic planning, but typically with a few dozen people. We are going to do it with thousands. That's just the way we do things. It will be harder and messier and take more time, but we're used to that. I also think it will as a result have a bigger impact. - I know our final answer won't match my personal priorities exactly, and as volunteers of course we can and will all still focus on our own passions. But the more we work together to agree on priorities, the more we can do as a community. Finally, I want to say I'm incredibly excited about this process. I'm confident the same energy and cooperation that creates a great article will also create a great strategic plan, and that we as a community have an amazing opportunity here to come together and set some direction for how over the next few years we can best pursue our vision. -stu stu <at> Wikimedia.org -----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Michael Snow Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 10:47 PM To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: [Foundation-l] More on Wikimedia strategic planning To follow up on the board's resolution, here is some more information about the strategy development process we are starting. This is not necessarily the complete picture, that hasn't been fully laid out yet and you will hear more about it in coming weeks and months. We will share progress as we go, and discussion is welcome. I expect the other members of the Board of Trustees, along with Sue, will be happy to join in. We spoke briefly about the project at our meeting with the chapter representatives in Berlin a few weeks ago. They may be able to help answer basic questions, and I also anticipate that the chapters will be a good way to relay ideas from the wider community. This is a rather unusual endeavor, as it is intended to be the world's first completely open and collaborative strategy development project. We aim to draw upon the experiences and knowledge of a wide range of contributors: Wikimedia volunteers, experts in various fields, the board, the foundation's staff, and other appropriate advisors that may be suggested to us. I'm excited about the possibilities in this project. Anybody who wants to help the Wikimedia projects is invited to participate. I expect that the primary activity will involve working groups developing pieces of the strategy on-wiki. That's both because it's the key tool for open collaboration we're all familiar with, and because it would be prohibitive in time or expense to coordinate strategic planning through a set of meetings, as might happen in a normal organization. All relevant planning outputs will be publicly available for review, as well as reuse, so hopefully we can produce some thinking that other groups will also find useful. We expect the strategic planning project to officially launch in July, although this is a preliminary kickoff of sorts as well. In the meantime, Sue is planning to hire a project manager, a research analyst, and a facilitator to support it. Those jobs will be posted on the Wikimedia Foundation site sometime during the next week. Between now and the launch, Sue will be hiring the project team. These positions will bring skills we already need, and while we want all the staff to have input, this will be the group designated to work particularly on this project. Sue and I will also be working through the structure and framework of the project: essentially, which strategic questions require the most focus. You will hear more about this, and I will be asking for your views, as we begin to make progress. --Michael Snow _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2009/5/1 phoebe ayers &lt;phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: If wikipedia like collections of information are still being written by human beings in a couple of decades I will be rather surprised. We've already to a large extent reached the point where the quickest way to fill in info boxes would be computers making suggestions and humans sanity checking them. -- geni

2009/5/1 philippe &lt;philippe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Going by the rate of guideline and policy growth on en there is probably a method somewhere. Doesn't really work. The flawed assumption is that very little of the wikimedia community cares about how others think they should move forward. Maybe but that doesn't stop me being concerned about where the foundation appears to be starting from. -- geni

Hoi, As the discussions about all these plans is going to be in English, it will be very much "others" telling communities how to behave, how to move forward. The notion that policies and guidelines are good is offset by people who found themselves not or no longer welcome and moved away. As this is already true for English language projects, you may appreciate that the notion that "the" rules and guidelines are beneficial is just wrong when you try to project them on other projects. When you want to transcend local policies and guidelines, you have to start thinking on a more global level. On this level there are big and small Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks etc. There are projects that serve a global need and are the victim of local constraints like Commons and also Meta. We are not organised in a way that gives priority to the more global issues and consequently we are very much unaware of issues that the "others" face and why our "local" issues can be irrelevant elsewhere. Given this lack of awareness there are few low hanging fruits because we forgot to bring the bees to the orchard. Thanks, GerardM 2009/5/2 philippe &lt;philippe.wiki(a)gmail.com&gt;

Thomas Dalton wrote: I'm very sympathetic to SJ's 300 year plan. Plans for 3, 30 and 300 years require different kinds of thinking, but all are equally important. They can be best appreciated by looking back for corresponding amounts of time. Three-year plans are almost too short to be called strategic. Members of the US House of Representatives are all subject to re-election every two years, and in such an environment the tactics of making sure that one is re-elected take on an undue importance. Accomplishments need a high level of immediacy. The focus needs to be on action, and anyone who introduces ideas with a longer-range impact that jeopardizes immediate accomplishments does so at his own political peril. Success depends on being able to show what you have accomplished. Thirty-year plans can be completed within one's own lifetime. Alternatively we inherit them from the previous generation or pass them on to the next. They need to be sufficiently concrete to allow seeing definite success thirty years hence, yet sufficiently realistic for us to imagine all the steps required to get us where we are going. They require long-term commitment to a project, and an ability to keep the quick-fix gang and their rules at a distance. Three hundred-year plans link us with people that none of us will never meet. They have more to do with philosophical underpinnings and beliefs. This year we will be celebrating(?) the 300th anniversary of the passage of the Statute of Anne, a document whose effects and consequences we continue to feel. In relation to free access to knowledge such plans need to plant the viral seeds that will prevent the usurpation of free access by vested interests. Ec

Stu writes: Until you got to these points, I was with you 100%. Now I'm not sure who you mean by 'we' . 1) We do in an abstract sense have limited money and energy. But we're far from saturating what has been raised so far. And our community have always managed to raise as much money as we needed, particularly when we it was clear what it was needed for and what the targets were. I certainly know of people and orgs who would gladly provide additional support, in kind or in money, were there a specific need for that; I expect many long-time wikimedians might say the same. So worries about limits should not color or hamper a first need-assessing effort! We also have a few magnitudes (2? 4?) more volunteer energy and input than is being directly focused towards particular strategic goals. Most people spend their time on-wiki working on projects that matter to them or that they've helped start, or that they happen to have cottoned to recently. There are few measures for telling editors (as an active body of volunteers) what larger priorities there are, or when they are furthering them. - There's no mechanism for this, regardless of where priorities come from. - We lack a set of shared, enumerated priorities or targets in usability, quality, outreach, languages, access for those without connectivity; and have few/limited priorities for tech scaling, performance, data center expansion, legal/trademark/copyright protections, etc. 2) You say the approach proposed in this thread - "widespread involvement from our entire community" is unprecedented. This is somewhat shocking :-) Everything Wikipedia is and has become has been through widespread involvement from our entire community. The same holds for most Wikimedia projects. For our Foundation to take a different approach to significant planning would be surprising. That said, I understand that this approach is, compared to processes of other non-profits, unusual. Please recognize that this approach is similarly unusual (in the other direction, with an unusually strong role for the Foundation as an independent entity) compared to other community-governed projects. Interesting comment. I'd like to resolve some of the issues above, to help people see/discuss large-scope priorities and see how they could contribute to them (or how much their daily work does contribute), before believing your own assumption above. I think right now few people actively care b/c there's no way for them to know about or reflect on larger issues. Change that and you'll change the picture. Not unlike civic engagement. If all you do is vote once every other year, you actually don't have much input into a social process. If you are actively engaged, and share your interests and concerns effectively with hundreds of people you know, clusters of people can again directly control large scale efforts, and that ability to simply go fix visible problems leads back to caring about the best way to move forward. GerardM writes +1. This should be an iterative process, and one of the first steps should be improving organisation of goals/priorities so that global issues are visible everywhere (and <cough> not only in English. If this is an important conversation, it too should be had in other languages). Likewise nonstandard local issues - as a member of a federation of states, I believe a diversity of local goals and implementations is useful for this type of planning). SJ

2009/5/2 Sue Gardner &lt;sgardner(a)wikimedia.org&gt;rg>: Would they have a budget? If not whats the point? Wikipedia is not short of places to have conversations. -- geni

2009/5/2 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: What would they spend it on? Talk is cheap, after all! Having conversations is easy, having focused conversations that actually reach useful conclusions is a little harder, but it isn't more expensive.

2009/5/2 geni &lt;geniice(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Without a little bureaucracy, this kind of thing doesn't work. Those are about doing stuff now, this is about planning for the future. Both are worthy of your time. Focusing talk is precisely what they are meant to do. I agree it is not something we are generally very good at, but it is worth making the effort. Some active research may be worthwhile for some parts of this process (and some money for that would be good), but I think talk is the most important part.

Sue Gardner wrote: Besides the off-planet complete database-backup I envisioned, another intriguing conceit would be to start on the process of transcribing wikipedia onto vellum with non-corrosive and persistent ink (I don't think there are enough stone tablets, or even clay for tablets to ever suffice, but vellum is clearly unlimited, if a little slow to come by). Naturally it would be reasonable to start the work on either the 1000 articles each wikipedia should have, or perhaps the featured articles or the like in each language. Or on the other hand, on the general theory of wikipedian ethos, simply as the spirit moved each actual artisan skilled in the art of old-fashioned calligraphy. I am not saying this should necessarily be something the foundation should devote great resources towards, but I am putting it out there for people to be inspired by... There could be great art to be had with this. Consider for instance the possibility of putting the metadata of the article (references, footnotes, etc.) as glosses in the margin, possibly even in a number of levels of margin glosses. And the oft agonized question of attribution and license inclusion. My suggestion is that it would be cool to actually impregnate each piece of vellum with an invisible ink palimpsest of the full GFDL, in very small print (not by hand, but some more mechanical process), and maybe the contributors too, and perhaps even crosswise printed, so there could be two levels of invisible ink palimpsest present). Then there could be a very small visible note in the bottom of each sheet to read the vellum with an UV- light source for the full license and list of contributors. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Just a few quick notes. * I was speaking with Lennart face-to-face, in Berlin -- although I think he and I have been having a version of the quality/participation conversation for about a year now. This conversation about the strategy project on foundation-l is the only one happening at the moment. (I posted one of my messages here to the internal list, but asked people to reply here to keep the conversation together and public.) * Personally, I don't think it matters (for the purposes of the strategic plan) whether particpation is a subset of something else. I think what matters is whether participation is important enough to warrant "working group" status -- and I think it is. To me, that's because 1) we need a minimum critical mass to keep the projects alive, 2) we need to actively recruit knowledgeable contributors, to maintain/increase quality, 3) a lack of diversity = groupthink and a distorted worldview. That distortion is particularly problematic for us, since we aspire to offer _all_ the world's knowledge, not just the subset that's interesting to our core contributors. 4) There are also probably good arguments about engagement and empowerment. A couple of quick comments on posts earlier in this thread: * Thanks Milos for advocating on behalf of a permanent Research Analyst! I want this too. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do with the role, and then we'll see where we are financially and in terms of other competing needs, once the strategy project concludes. * I don't particularly want to routinely include "working with volunteer committees" in job descriptions though. Obviously working with volunteers is a huge part of nearly everybody's job (the CFOO and accountant probably do this the least, which is role-appropriate), but I don't want to proscribe committee work specifically as the best or only way to do that. I think each staff person needs to figure out for their area of responsibility how their work and the community can most usefully intersect. For example, Frank works mainly with individual chapters: I think a committee of chapter reps would not be the best path for his work. (If it was, he'd be doing it.) * In response to geni/Thomas, I doubt the Working Groups will need much or any money -- my past experience suggests that administrative and facilitative support is much more important to getting this kind of thing done. But if people need money, they will get it. And I think geni suggested the Working Groups won't have access to staff -- that's not true. The board and I are imagining staff will participate in two primary ways: 1) some staff will be working group members -- for example, I imagine Frank would be a member of a participation-focused or quality-focused group, and) as resources available to all working groups. So if someone for example had a legal question, Mike would be available for that. SJ, in response to the general issue about foundation-l not being the best (nor most representative) place to have this whole conversation -- sure, I agree. In my view, I'm using foundation-l to solicit some early thinking from people who happen to be here. Once there's a project manager on-board, that person will construct a proper working space for the entire project -- likely, a special wiki, a new mailing list, etc. But this space is the best we've got for early-stage thinking and musing, until we're ready for more structured discussions. Thanks, Sue -----Original Message----- From: Samuel Klein &lt;meta.sj(a)gmail.com&gt; Date: Sun, 3 May 2009 02:08:26 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List&lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] More on Wikimedia strategic planning I could use a revision history and list of related discussions for this conversation. [perhaps a mailing list isn't the best or highest-visibility venue, considering the audience] Where else is this conversation taking place? Are past discussions of high-priority questions relevant? On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 11:43 AM, Sue Gardner &lt;sgardner(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: Vision & Reflection is an important topic left out here, before all of the others. What are we trying to accomplish? What is now possible, what should be possible? How are we doing it, how can we do it better? This process itself form deserves more thorough ongoing consideration, equal at least to the other topics you list. Also high on my list : Coverage (of types of knowledge) and Reuse (in other formats) are also high on my list. Coverage : we've stopped creating new projects. There are still massive areas of knowledge not covered by existing Wikimedia projects. What does this mean? Reuse : in formats other than one article per topic, online or off; most works or processes which involve knowledge could benefit from direct use of WP material, yet most do not use it directly, for awareness, license confusion, or other reasons. Was this discussion in another thread? I'd like to see Lennart's and others' rationale here.* SJ * I do not think Participation is a subset of Quality. It could be considered a complete subset of Reach, if the latter is interpreted broadly. Within reach, splitting reading and contributing may be reasonable (I assume your intent above was that participation means editors/conversers/lawyers/scripters). For me an eventual goal is that every person becomes a contributor (or understands what it means to be a potential contributor). I do not agree that the primary reason for this is to increase quality. For instance, new ideas and directions, and increased reuse through personal affiliation with the project, are both higher on my personal list of advantages to higher participation. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

2009/5/3 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen &lt;cimonavaro(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: 3 million clay tablets would be possible and vellum and the like tends not to last to well in the long term outside some limited climates. -- geni

Thomas Dalton wrote: I suspect the contrary. There were initial claims that CD's would be nigh impossible to degrade, and the truth turned out to be completely at variance with the assertions. I really think a proven track record counts in this actual case. Surely it would be useful to place those vellum records where it is known they have in the past come to no harm. On the unconnected point of value of materials; really it would be much preferred if the material itself had as little intrinsic value as possible. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

2009/5/3 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen &lt;cimonavaro(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Which were guesswork. Materials scientists could probably come up with something but it's not worthwhile for anything more advanced than a phonograph record since the ability to play them is likely to get lost rather quickly. No such place. At best you can manage limited harm by burying them in deserts (egypt mostly) or perhaps peat bogs About the only other place such things last for any length of time are some of the Chinese archives and European monasteries. -- geni

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Vellum is far more vulnerable to fire and plagues of locusts than stone. Ec

Hi! Reading this thread I thought of something that was discussed in Berlin: Is there any need for a fourth Working Group? Additional to the three major themes mentioned by Sue (Reach, Quality and Participation), what about another working group to focus on the long-term Sustainability of the Wikimedia movement? There is already a great deal of ideas here about how should the Foundation: cover other parts of human knowledge (coverage); preserve database (off-planet...); enable sustainable growth (affiliation...); face financial challenges (endowment...); etc. Should all or some of the ideas above be discussed in another working group? This working group could be described as something like: 4. Sustainability. The goal of this Working Group will be to make sure the Wikimedia movement can reach its vision in a sustainable way. It could answer important sub-group questions like: *How to sustain Wikimedia services and data across any major situation? *How to start new valuable projects to cover other parts of human knowledge? *How to promote innovation within our network? *How to support the development of new significant tools and services? *How to organize the structure of the Wikimedia movement? *How to sustain the financial needs of the Wikimedia movement? What do you think? abraços, Thomas

Дана Sunday 03 May 2009 14:28:00 Thomas Dalton написа: It seems to me that you are joking, but I was seriously thinking about cooperating with the Long Now project on long term preservation of Wikipedia. Printing Wikipedia on acid-free paper every year or at least decade in several copies dispersed on several continents should ensure that the contents last for several centuries at least. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive either and it could gather some media attention (= sponsors). For a really long term, a cooperation with some brickworks, where a brick printer would be introductd in the brick producing process, so that Wikipedia (and other important works) would be printed on every brick produced. We know that Sumerian tablets have lasted for thousands of years, so these bricks would surely last that long too. And for even longer, do the same with bottle manufacturers.

Nikola Smolenski wrote: Heh, that reminds me of a fresh Finnish patented method of "printing" on concrete, and the freshly built archival building in Hämeenlinna. Here is a bit of detail of the wall of the building. see if it reminds you of anything familiar to us all? http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_YiztANGzgQA/SFWP29Opa8I/AAAAAAAAAEE/X4b_e9sVd-8/s… This method of making a lasting impression on concrete is said to be not much more expensive than ordinary concrete. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen