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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
To state the obvious.... what community ? There are over 250 Wikipedias,
there are Wiktionaries, Wikiversities, Wikibooks etc. all of them build
their own communities, their own policies. So I am not sure at all what
community you are talking about. What is absolutely clear to me is that
there is no consensus among all these communities and even within a single
community it is hard to find agreement on any single issue.

Given what the aim of the Foundation and its projects is, it is likely a lot
easier to get a clue what is helpful to the people we do it all for.
Thanks,
      GerardM

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 9:51 PM, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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> >
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