[Foundation-l] Community representation

[Milos Rancic]

On 1/10/08, James Forrester <jdforrester at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe I'm a complete fool, but isn't that the point of Chapters? I
> understood the concept of Wikicouncil to be a combination of
> project-specific and geographical representatives. Already people
> would have two (or more!) forms of input in to the Council - would it
> be necessary to have even more, especially as most people interested
> in the Wikicouncil would be interested in the Foundation anyway?
>
> In case I make myself look (even more) like a fool, I should explain
> that my ideas on Wikicouncil were formed back in '03/'04 ish. and so I
> may be very out of date. I sadly don't have time to read every post
> even to this list. :-(

There are two very different levels of Wikimedian organization. At the
first, main level, editor level, we don't need to think about time: if
we don't have some article or some fact or anything else, it is
reasonable to suppose that we will have it in the future. (OK, this
applies for every project except for Wikinews partially.)

The second level is a real time organization, which implies thinking
about money, organizing real life events, communicating with outer
world etc.

The second level is covered by the WMF and chapters. The first level
is partially covered by chapters, but chapters are much almost in the
same position as WMF: they have to think much more about real time and
real life things.

So, we don't have covered the first level. And, unlike in the case of
the second level, where we need functional bodies which deal with
particular real events, the first level should be covered by a body
which would represent all editors, programmers and other people who
are participating in Wikimedia projects.

And here is the example: Try to ask the Board to implement NPOV on all
Wikipedias at the articles about George Bush :) I think that they
would just ignore you :) (at the best, you will get some generic email
which says that they are WMF and WMF doesn't have relation with
content). Try to ask that any chapter Board. In the best case (but
don't expect it from "multilingual chapters" like WM CH is; or from
monolingual chapters which represents only a part of the language
body, like WM UK and WM AU are), they would say to you: "OK, I am not
able to do that as a member of the Board of WM XX, but I'll try to
help you as a Wikipedian on the XX Wikipedia. Please, consider that I
don't know other languages and that en.wp is not my primary project."