[Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF

[Ray Saintonge]

George Herbert wrote:
> I know EB and World Book contributors who are very upset about
> Wikipedia's rise, and many who see it as a godsend to information
> propogation around the world, on the order of the rise of the Web and
> of Google.  There are lost jobs at EB and WB - but the Post Office has
> lost jobs due to email and skype and cellphones.  Technology has an
> evolving effect on the world.  My grandfather owned and operated the
> last cooperage in San Francisco in the era between the world wars -
> and sold it off, seeing the rise of the steel barrel as being a
> world-ending event for that industry as they became more commonly
> available.  The new owners thought he was a fool for selling, and were
> out of business a few years later.  The industry my college degree is
> in (Naval Architecture, and the shipbuilding industry) is for the most
> part dead in the United States compared to when I graduated - I saw
> the writing on the wall and learned computers too, and that's what's
> paid the bills.
>   

My great-grandfather was a harness maker in small town Saskatchewan.  It 
seems that he saw the writing on the wall when tractors began to replace 
horses for ploughing the fields.  His harness shop burned down in 1922, 
and local legend has it that he was seen driving away from town as this 
was happening.

What you have hit upon is the well known dark side of real paradigm shift.

> This is part of life.  Either you learn to live with change or it runs
> you over eventually.  Companies that don't die; people that don't end
> up unemployed or working in much less skilled jobs eventually.  This
> isn't Wikipedia's fault - it's the pace of change, over the last 200
> years at least.
>
>   
That 200 years has seen both winners and losers.  The shipbuilding 
industry may be dead in the United States, but I suspect that that one 
has more to do with cheaper offshore wages than technical advances. This 
does not detract from your principal thesis.  I don't think we are at 
all close to seeing all the negative effects of these advances, and the 
resultant labour surplus.

Ec