Hoi,
Our community, movement and our foundation is pretty darn good. When you
consider all the imperfections, there is after all room for improvement, it
is really amazing how much is achieved on such a shoestring budget. We pay
the prize for under-investing in our organisation, in our infrastructure.
Our "primary" systems however are pretty stable.
My point is not that we should lose our ethos but that we should be more
smart about it. It is only fairly recently that we have the talent to
really improve the basics of our infra structure. We now have our systems
in multiple professional locations, The guts of MediaWiki is changing in
more than one way. Wikidata will make a splash in 2015. As it is, it is has
so much room for growth. The biggest amount of data will arrive from the
bigger projects however, the biggest potential is in the 250 other
languages that we support.
Yes, there are plenty individual stories that suck. But our projects will
never be like Nupedia. Some people have to revisit what we learned. One of
the lessons was that we can be and should be daring and innovative. Not
heeding this lesson is what will most likely do us in.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 30 November 2014 at 15:23, rupert THURNER <rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
hi mz,
you are right, the whole wikipedia is built by volunteer time and
could have not been built otherwise. so volunteer time clearly is
worth significantly more. i sometimes feel ripped off as a volunteer.
first i donate my time, and then people approach me to addtionally
spend money for a conference, like last year in geneva 250eur for an
open knowledge conference. or i want to meet a person who is not
wealthy enough to pay her trip to london within the UK, and there is
no way to get her a 100 gbp, as happend last year. wmf is not capable
- i should have planned this a year in advance. wmch would be flexible
enough but a different country and punished by WMF for beeing
flexible. wmuk does not have a budget for such a strange thing, and it
should have known it in advance as well.
so where should this money come from? the easiest and cheapest is:
take the money from the website. coupled with a more flexible,
localised spending scheme. so WMCH or WMUK could pay this without
headache. but WMF does not want this. out of 60 mio usd income, 52 mio
or 86% is spent by the wikimedia foundation, yearly increasing. and
most of it is spent in the united states.
some time in future even wmf persons will recognize that if i would be
perfectly organized and most intelligent person in the world i would
use zero time for wikipedia. i'd instead sell my time as expensive as
possible, and i'd be rich as bill gates. the foundation, and even some
chapters, give the impression only perfect persons are good enough for
them. or, even worse, treat them deliberatly like cattle. the core of
its movement with it turns away, as those people are not good enough.
and as bill gates and the other perfect persons will not contribute,
nobody will. so we are back on field one, nupedia. jimbo has his
personal foundation which will honor him even when he is dead,
financed by one of the worlds largest websites. the foundation pays
1000 persons to keep it running. no volunteers necessary.
rupert
On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 3:36 AM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Wikimedia always accepts donations. If the
Wikimedia Foundation can't
figure out a way to easily accept monetary donations from Dutch
Wikimedians, why not simply focus efforts on non-monetary donations?
Edits and other wiki contributions are far more valuable, in my opinion.
Wikimedia Nederland seems to already be doing a lot of great work
encouraging these types of contributions (e.g., Wiki Loves [X]). :-)
For the past few years I've seen it as fairly low-hanging fruit to create
a tongue-in-cheek "don't donate to Wikipedia" or "donate time
instead" or
similar campaign. Or even register "DonateToWikipedia.org" and send
visitors to the edit form of an article that needs love. When people ask
me in real-life about donating to Wikipedia (nobody knows what Wikimedia
is), I typically suggest making a few edits instead of donating money
directly. I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation really needs the money
and I think volunteer time is worth significantly more.
MZMcBride
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