[Foundation-l] A contribution to numerology

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 9:50 PM, Marcus Buck <me at marcusbuck.org> wrote:
>  If Wikipedia is worth 7 billions at the moment, that would mean, every
>  article is worth (we hit 10 million articles some time ago) some 700
>  dollars. Oh my god! If I idiot wouldn't have released my articles under
>  fucking GFDL and if I instead had sold them on the free market, I could
>  be a millionaire! I should stop contributing to Wikipedia at once ;-)
>
>  And translate it into the country thing: That means I could reign over
>  my own country with more inhabitants than the Vatican! King Marcus I. of
>  Buckonia! Nice dreams ;-)

Thomas told you about a synergy. The other issue is related to the
significance of Wikimedian projects: they are maybe the most important
foundation of this generation of humans to the future generations. And
this is only in the sense of knowledge, without counting any other
aspect of Wikimedia (which are maybe at the same level of
significance).

If things will continue to go *ordinary*, which means that the Board
and the rest of the community don't make big mistakes, which, also,
means that we should do right things from time to time (for example,
organizing community inside of the chapters is one of such right
things), it will mean:

- Through time, more and more people will be willing to give big
donations to the Wikimedia (not only to WMF, but to the chapters and
similar organizations in the future). This is a very important issue
for those (formal) organizations: If someone decides to donate now a
big house to WM Serbia, I am almost sure that WM Serbia wouldn't be
able to accept it (and it seems that the same applies for WM UK);
while WM DE will be able to accept such gift. However, I am sure that
even WMF and all chapters together wouldn't be able to accept such
gift if the house is, let's say, in Brazil, while if it is in Spain we
would need a lot of efforts to take the gift.

- In this moment I am able to go to Zagreb and feel like I am at home
only because I am a Wikimedian. This may be applied for a lot of
Wikimedians at different meridians.

- In a decade or two we will have almost the same number of offices in
different countries as UN has. A visible benefit of having such number
of offices for ordinary Wikimedians is that they will be able to meet
people with whom they share the same values all over the world. But,
more important benefit will be a strong network (in this moment we
have a not so strong network [of contributors]) of people dedicated to
free knowledge based on scientific values (and, unlike existing
scientific networks, our network is not partialized to branches).
Synergy (again) of this network may generate the most important global
cultural movement in the history. (And this is not because other ideas
in the history were not great, but because we have a much better tool
for communication, the Interent, now.)

- And back to the money. If we are talking about long term
consequences (50-100 years), it is not possible to count the value in
money. However, influence of such movement will be not based just at
the fact of owning Wikipedia, but much more based on a number and
quality of people involved in the movement. And in a decade or two it
will be comparable with a country with 10-20 millions of inhabitants.
If everything goes *ordinary*.

- There is one more extremely important issue. There is no other
similar phenomenon in the world. Without Wikimedia we wouldn't have
any grass-roots movement which aims to gather people for their common
interest, not only related to free knowledge. This fact brings to all
of us extremely high responsibility.

(And, btw, from time to time I am really feeling a little bit
frustrated because I have an impression (maybe wrong?) that a lot of
Wikimedians don't see those facts and very predictable future trends,
very obvious to me.)

I realize that it is hard to the Board members to deal with such level
of responsibility when they need to think would they have enough of
money for tickets for Board meeting or so. But, I am sure that the
most of other people who are participating in foundation-l discussions
or just reading our emails -- are ready to help. Transparent work is
sometimes very hard, but this is the only possible way for building
mutual understanding, which is more than necessary if we are willing
to take the responsibility which we achieved by our work.