[Foundation-l] Candidate statements

[SJ]

What amazes me is how *little* space we all devote to writing about
the fundamental issues the projects as collections, their communities,
and the foundation face.  We have spurts of conversation that trail
off, with many interested parties not joining in at all (though they
surely have strong and interesting opinions).

On 9/21/06, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>  Accordng to Gmaxwell, the largest candidate statement is approximately 20,000 words, i.e., a novella. We have 17 candidates this election. If each one wrote a statement of that length, we would have 340,000 words to read, i.e., statements totalling several times the length of "War and Peace" or a standard Dickens novel. We are talking "A la recherche du temps perdu."

What I wouldn't give to have such material to read!  350,000 words of
serious statements about what the future of the foundation and
projects should be, or about how to come to shared understandings of
these goals and how to work better together...  I could fill a
bookshelf, if not a library, with that kind of discourse, and it would
still be too little.  Extend this idea to the span of all possible
collaborative projects, and one could fill a library.

There *will* be libraries filled with such writing someday; what a
pity if it is all done by sociologists and historians who were not
part of these events, rather than by those of us who were.


>  I suggest that the time of Wikimedians can be better spent than reading statements of this length by, for example, researching articles. I would suggest that the time of our translators could be better spent working on making high quality content available in all languages.

Those with better things to do will not read.  Those who are willing
and able to write, please do so.  The sooner and the more attentively
to detail, the better.

--SJ