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

[Nathan]

Mike,

Can you address the point that all content and nearly all policies are
generated and
maintained by this community, and that as a result the community has and
should
continue to have a direct input into the Foundation's view of "what the
world needs
and wants"? Clearly WMF is not a democracy, but an element of
philosophically and
pragmatically motivated responsiveness to the desires of the community has
always
been present. As constituencies go - this particular constituency is
responsible
both for serving and defining all other constituencies, and a poll that
reflects the strong
will of the community should be more or less binding - if for no other
reasons than
the practical. I believe advertising is the right move - but I don't believe
it can be
implemented against the clear will of the Wikimedia community.

Nathan

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 4:45 PM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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