The Funds Dissemination Committee was originally proposed by Sue to the board with explicit support for both groups and individuals,[1] but at some point after, all mention of individual editors was removed.[2]
Could someone please say whether this was the decision of the board, someone else's decision, or a mistake? I ask because I have reason to believe that about 18% of English Wikipedia administrators are living below the poverty line, and it seems that support for such individual editors is reasonable. Local fire departments and the International Red Cross both have paid personnel and volunteer staff working alongside each other without any motivational crowding.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Draft_FDC_Propo... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Eligibility_criteria
On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 3:38 PM, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
I ask because I have reason to believe that about 18% of English Wikipedia administrators are living below the poverty line, ...
First off I got the impression that specific type of support was never the intention of the FDC but I don't pretend to know exactly what the board was thinking.
More importantly however citation desperately needed for this stat. You can't make a statement like that without actual evidence 'I have reason to believe' doesn't tell us anything at all especially for something that broad.
James
--- James Alexander jamesofur@gmail.com
While this is a tangent, it's an interesting one! I don't think anyone has done great empirical testing on the income demographics of Wikipedia administrators. It looks like income was not included in the 2011 survey; it does say that 42% of all respondents were unemployed, but this is likely driven by the number of students and minors.
In any case, "poverty line" is a subjective definition that varies dramatically by jurisdiction. In the U.S., approximately 15% of the population lives below the U.S. definition of the poverty line. Given that, it seems extremely unlikely that 18% (or even 15% or 10%) of American Wikipedians live below that line; for other jurisdictions or definitions of the line, it seems hard to speculate.
On the larger question, I'm with Jamesofur that I don't think supporting Wikipedians financially (other than via fellowships as part of the program budget) was ever on the table. Or at least if it was, I certainly didn't hear about it.
~Nathan
On 10/24/2012 3:38 PM, James Salsman wrote:
The Funds Dissemination Committee was originally proposed by Sue to the board with explicit support for both groups and individuals,[1] but at some point after, all mention of individual editors was removed.[2]
Could someone please say whether this was the decision of the board, someone else's decision, or a mistake? I ask because I have reason to believe that about 18% of English Wikipedia administrators are living below the poverty line, and it seems that support for such individual editors is reasonable. Local fire departments and the International Red Cross both have paid personnel and volunteer staff working alongside each other without any motivational crowding.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Draft_FDC_Propo... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Eligibility_criteria
I suspect you may have formed for yourself a rather different conception of the proposed system than what was actually contemplated. To your first footnote, I find it strange that you would focus on the section headed "Application process and timeline" for an eligibility question when there's a section immediately above it regarding eligibility, and that section is exclusively about groups (entities), not individuals. The page in your second footnote is pretty clearly an expansion of that eligibility section, so it's not surprising if they're consistent with each other.
If I understand things correctly, anything in the FDC materials that refers to individuals receiving funds should probably be interpreted as referring to the Wikimedia grants program, which does invite individual applicants and will continue on as far as I'm aware. The grants program as a whole would naturally be under the purview of the FDC, but that's at another level of the process, so individuals wouldn't be directly participating in the FDC process in that sense.
--Michael Snow
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