[Foundation-l] Fundraising ideas - bursting the bubble

[Michael R. Irwin]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>You seem have odd notions about how much work, beyond babysitting
>their pet article and windbagging on lists, that a majority of our
>volunteers are willing to perform.
>_______________________________________________
>  
>
Part of the problem attracting interest in what others choose to define 
as "work" is this mindset of telling others to shut up and get back to 
work or attempting to shut down information flow by calling others 
"windbags" or implying if they will not volunteer for your personally 
defined most important task they should minimize the impact on the 
mailing list.

This was chanted early and often by our lead editors and founding 
members.   I arrived at 39k and counting.   Now the English wikipedia 
has well over a million articles and counting and a few people on this 
list, which as I understand it is not the wikipedia english list, are 
presenting issues around the quality of articles throughout the english 
Wikipedia as a possibly generic problem with wiki data products built by 
internet volunteers.  Shutting up and adding another article to the pile 
will not resolve this or many other issues which the Wikimedia 
Foundation is experiencing.

Feel free to ignore my posts.  It will reduce the wind for the next few 
days, weeks, or months substantially.

I intend to particpate heavily in this list until it becomes time to 
initialize wikiversity and I shall vamoose for a while until in my 
perception it becomes advantageous to my pet project with wikiversity to 
show up and absorb some more information regarding the politics, 
organization, and procedures that seem to be impacting my preferred 
tasks in less than optimal ways.

I know little of your background but I will share with you in case it 
has escaped your attention that even when you are paying people it is 
usually counter productive to "yell shut up and get back to work" unless 
you are running an old style sweatshop or have very specific well 
defined tasks and plenty of supervisors standing around playing gestapo.

Modern business practice in the U.S. has generally concluded the 
getstapo overhead is too high to remain competitive.   Perhaps this is 
true even when not paying some or most of the work force?

Have a nice day.

regards,
lazyquasar