[Foundation-l] aWheeler #00 - by the grace of Wikimedia

[Michael R. Irwin]

Zack Clark wrote:

>In-Reply-To: <50174.82.45.205.32.1149878975.squirrel at webmail7.pair.com>
>on Fri, 9 Jun Alison Wheeler wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of
>>>participants don't really care about the foundation.  They just want
>>>to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image
>>>repository/whatever.
>>>It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of
>>>Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and
>>Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the
>>grace of Wikimedia (Foundation). If someone wants to play rough with a
>>Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and
>>trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for
>>that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the
>>foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to.
>>.............
>>    
>>
>
>Alison raises a crucial point here (even if tangent to Anthony's).
>So, if WMF attracts rough play by being the legal body responsible
>for entries - what can be done to eradicate said responsibility??
>  
>
As Kelly and others have pointed out get and stay legal.  The policies 
under which content is released by clicking the edit button has always 
made this clear from way back.

A professer at Wikiversity who does research in neurology professionally 
has proposed that an early focus of Wikiversity be a class/project 
assisting new Wikipedia editors with learning better editing and 
technical writing skills.   This should help the neophytes making honest 
mistakes vs. troublemakers if it ever gets off the ground.

Perhaps we need a bit better knowledge of Wikipedia's editors and 
neophytes to help reduce this phenomen.  It is my understanding that 
people with knowledge of each other sort out into cliques or teams and 
tend to train and regulate each other while huge crowds of strangers are 
easily turned into mobs.  

>Backing up to Anthony's post.  I readily admit that there are plenty of
>Internet services which I enthusiastically & respectfully employ without
>ever really caring about their foundations.  WP is a whole other animal
>however, and it is difficult to see how anyone who's been made aware of
>the phenomenon could fail to be extremely interested in all its aspects.
>But gawd knows, this is the exact type of thing I can be so wrong about.
>Therefore, who has some good ideas on how to estimate what percentage of
>Wikipedians are interested in WMF?
>  
>
Count the number of different handles or email addresses in the archive 
that have posted to Wikimedia Foundation mailing lists vs project 
mailing lists then divide by the number of handles the system or 
wikistats report as active in a recent time period.

regards,
lazyquasar