[Foundation-l] Where we are headed. (was Wikimedia main office)

[Delirium]

Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Robin Shannon wrote:
>   
>> I just don't think it is our role to deal with the problems
>> of Africa and any of the other projects envisioned.
>>     
>
> Could be a bit more clear about what projects you think are being
> envisioned which are not about our core mission?  I ask, because I am
> unaware of any.
>   

Our "core mission" is pretty broad, so probably most of the differencees 
of opinion are over what part of that mission we ought to be spending 
the most effort on.

I personally think that by far the most important part of our core 
mission should be to produce a Free (as in Freedom) compendium of human 
knowledge, and that there should be a core organization dedicated solely 
to that task with no other distracting/ancillary tasks.

That's not to say nothing else needs to get done, but it doesn't all 
need to be done by the *same* core organization.  My main worry is that 
if there is one giant organization, and actually producing the 
encyclopedia becomes a focus of only a minority of its budget and paid 
staff, that will not improve its quality.  It will also prevent 
Wikipedians from being able to pick and choose which other projects they 
support or don't support; instead they'll have to make one binary 
decision to "support Wikimedia" or not.

For example, if an African organization (preferably run by actual 
Africans, not Europeans and Americans) thought Wikipedia would be useful 
in some guise (perhaps CD-ROMs in schools; perhaps paper encyclopedias) 
and wanted to distribute it for that purpose, I would strongly support 
that, would donate to the organization, and would support acting on any 
reasonable requests for changes on the content-production end that would 
make their job easier.

That's not to say that it's impossible to have one organization do both 
or that any possible organization doing both would turn out horribly, 
but I think it's a worse arrangement and don't support it, which seems 
to me at least a reasonable opinion (of course, it's my claim, so I 
would think so).

In any case, that sort of thing is already happening to some extent with 
the German paper version, which I see as a positive sign.

-Mark