[Foundation-l] what do we do in the event the Foundation fails? - Re: Policy governance ends

[Platonides]

David Gerard wrote:
> At the moment I'm quite worried about Commons. The image dump is HUGE
> and I don't think there's been a good dump of it for a while. And
> 300-400GB of images is quite a lot for people to keep around casually.
Me too. It's not movable.

>> I was going to suggest we could publish some user db data with yet
>> another hashing layer, but we can't. We sure have too many users with a
>> one-letter password.
>> But don't worry. Users table are so small that Brion can save them under
>> his pillow ;-)
> 
> 
> Let's assume Brion is 100% trustworthy with personal information (I
> think we can actually assume this is true). The WMF is eaten by
> invading Martian badgers.
> 
> * How much work to verify any person is who they say they are?
> * Who does he give the results to?

He can visit the chair of the board and give it on hand (or were the 
board members eaten, too?).
In a complete anarchy model, he could make a call to all wikimedians to 
meet and decide where to revive the wiki.

If server collapses, *I* could be verified by this email (ML are well 
replicated), irc nickname, betawiki login...
But those users who have never sent an email, are completely 
unreachable, and we can't publish the email list to the spammers... :P

> In the second case, a public list of "this old-userID is this OpenID"
> would be something that wouldn't violate a confidence - if each person
> made the match by logging in and submitting the OpenID they wanted to
> correlate and publicise for credit.
Who would store such list? When a wikipedian to e wants to open an account
who would they ask for an OpenID? How would this website verify who this 
user is? YOu are only "moving" the problem.


>> About the forks
>> Wikimedia projects have something more than the database. They have a
>> great userbase.
>> As long as WMF accomplishes what users want, WMF will have the supremacy
>> over db copiers. Many people copy our articles, but so long, only
>> citizendium has been a threat, and that because it takes a different
>> approach (and had a lot of publicity).
> 
> 
> Citizendium is not a threat - it's validation of our model and of open
> content in general.
> 
> Really. Can you imagine anyone starting a new encyclopedia on the
> Britannica model?

"threat" for having a number of users. But it's different, so not really 
competing.