[Foundation-l] LA Times article / Advertising in Wikipedia

[Mike Godwin]

Andrew Whitworth writes:

On Mar 11, 2008, at 11:47 AM, foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org  
wrote:

>  I think that the most direct way to measure the communities feelings
> on this issue would be to include referenda about it in the next board
> election. Whoever handles the elections could easily add a handful of
> optional questions to the end of the ballot, about this issue and many
> others on which community opinion data would be valuable.

As someone who was a statistician in another life, I feel compelled to  
point out that even this wouldn't necessarily elicit a representative  
sample of the community's opinion -- it samples, at best, only that  
subset of the community who (a) votes in elections, and (b) would be  
willing to offer an opinion in the course of voting in an election.

There are methods of providing more representative sampling, but they  
typically require a significant amount of upfront poll design.

What makes this more complicated, though, is the question of whether  
Wikimedia should gear its strategies in response to what the  
"community" (however defined) wants, as distinct from what the world  
needs.  We articulate our primary mission in terms of the world rather  
than in terms of the community.  It is not inconceivable that what the  
world wants or needs is not entirely the same as what the community  
wants. If so, then what?

My own view, as I think is we should serve the world as a whole, of  
which the community is an outspoken, well-informed, but still  
relatively small subset. (Obviously, I also believe the barriers to  
entry to the community should be lowered as much as possible,  
consistent with this principle -- in this, I point to the great work  
of Andrew Lih in outlining the increasing barriers to entry, due to  
expansion of rule sets, for Wikipedians.)


--Mike