[Foundation-l] Fundraising ideas - bursting the bubble

[Anthere]

Michael R. Irwin wrote:
> Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> 
> 
>>You seem have odd notions about how much work, beyond babysitting
>>their pet article and windbagging on lists, that a majority of our
>>volunteers are willing to perform.
>>_______________________________________________
>> 
>>
> 
> Part of the problem attracting interest in what others choose to define 
> as "work" is this mindset of telling others to shut up and get back to 
> work or attempting to shut down information flow by calling others 
> "windbags" or implying if they will not volunteer for your personally 
> defined most important task they should minimize the impact on the 
> mailing list.
> 
> This was chanted early and often by our lead editors and founding 
> members.   I arrived at 39k and counting.   Now the English wikipedia 
> has well over a million articles and counting and a few people on this 
> list, which as I understand it is not the wikipedia english list, are 
> presenting issues around the quality of articles throughout the english 
> Wikipedia as a possibly generic problem with wiki data products built by 
> internet volunteers.  Shutting up and adding another article to the pile 
> will not resolve this or many other issues which the Wikimedia 
> Foundation is experiencing.
> 
> Feel free to ignore my posts.  It will reduce the wind for the next few 
> days, weeks, or months substantially.
> 
> I intend to particpate heavily in this list until it becomes time to 
> initialize wikiversity and I shall vamoose for a while until in my 
> perception it becomes advantageous to my pet project with wikiversity to 
> show up and absorb some more information regarding the politics, 
> organization, and procedures that seem to be impacting my preferred 
> tasks in less than optimal ways.
> 
> I know little of your background but I will share with you in case it 
> has escaped your attention that even when you are paying people it is 
> usually counter productive to "yell shut up and get back to work" unless 
> you are running an old style sweatshop or have very specific well 
> defined tasks and plenty of supervisors standing around playing gestapo.
> 
> Modern business practice in the U.S. has generally concluded the 
> getstapo overhead is too high to remain competitive.   Perhaps this is 
> true even when not paying some or most of the work force?
> 
> Have a nice day.
> 
> regards,
> lazyquasar


Oh, we reached the Godwin point ;-)
Well, whilst I certainly do not agree with all your points lazyquasar, I 
found many insightful comments in your emails. I do not ignore your posts.

Ant