One could argue market economy inevitably ends up in monopolies, similarly projects drawing less attention or offering no short-term benefits die of starvation. Fixing Wikidata technical weaknesses, for example, didn't draw enough attention for years.
Vito
Il giorno lun 3 gen 2022 alle ore 02:22 Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se ha scritto:
On 2022-01-01 21:37, Mike Peel wrote:
Hi Asaf,
That's a good response, but I'm not sure it provides a practical way forward. How can volunteers bring this issue to the attention of the WMF leadership to get the allocation of the time of Wikimedia staff who can take ownership implement changes here?
We have thousands of volunteers. And that's a problem. We wish that we had millions of volunteers.
Even with only thousands of volunteers, bringing more things "to the attention" of WMF leadership would be disasterous. The solution must lie in the opposite direction: solving issues without having to bring them to the attention of the top leadership.
This whole discussion reminds me of inefficiencies of the Soviet economy. How can central planning be so inefficient? If only Stalin or Brezhnev knew, he would put things straight, right? How can we bring more details to the Kremlin's attention?
The western, non-communist approach is to empower individuals to run enterprises without bringing everything to the attention of the top leadership. In a free market economy.
But a market economy for us, must mean that resources are allocated to those who are able to offer solutions that saves resources for other volunteers. How can we do this without paying actual money for the solutions? If your video upload costs you dozens of hours, and I can design a solution that saves your time, how can your saving benefit me? And after the new solution is in place, free for all, how will anybody know that it saves them dozens of hours? This is the big question that we should focus on answering.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Linköping, Sweden
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