Hi Teofilo,

Chapters are geographic entities, I don't think they have a role in disputes about Commons templates. As for the controversial content referendum, I suspect some chapters or proto chapters in Islamic countries will be strongly for having such filters. But the content filtering thing is a Foundation initiative. If you want to judge the chapters look at the things they are achieving - I'm a Londoner and I think that having a chapter helps with our collaborations with the British Museum and other UK Museums. Yes you can have a GLAM initiative without a chapter, but sometimes it makes a difference - some institutions want to talk to a local organisation not a local volunteer or a US organisation.

Details as to what the United Kingdom chapter has been getting up to are at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reports - I don't know where you are from but if there is a chapter there I suggest you look up their reports.

As for the money issue, we need local national if we are to get charity status in different tax jurisdictions. In some countries that may not mean much money, but here in the UK it is a big opportunity. If you look at other international charities you will find that creating national organisations is not an unusual strategy.

WSC

Message: 1 Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2011 14:14:11 +0200 From: Teofilo teofilowiki@gmail.com Subject: [Foundation-l] Wikimedia chapters' raison d'?tre? To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CABsdk68K0-L-pNUGp-LdydM2WG-ocuwERVWLkRUB9Ob+nzeAKQ@mail.gmail.com

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Wikimedia chapters are not only an example of what should not be seen in Wikimedia projects (an "institution[...], of any kind, [...] claiming to represent [...] individuals" [1]) they also absorb funds and hire people, pushing with more weight the goal to make money (a salaried person expects his/her salary to be increased by X % each year) which is different from what a volunteer based project should be.

They aslo are de facto put in a position where people expect them to perform decision making. It is already bad that they deprive the communities of a decision making of their own, and take volunteer seats at the WMF board of trustees, but they don't do the job. See

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:CC-AR-Presidency#Bad_templat... . If the chapters showed that they are helpful in doing things better than what volunteer communities alone can do, they could prove that they are useful. But I am afraid they are not doing this. If they are not present when we need them...

[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2010_Wikimedia_Study_of_Controversial_Content...