On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 6:44 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
The community has heard a lot from the WMF about courage, honesty, integrity and leadership – and rather too much of the latter of late: let's remember that the Wikimedia Foundation's values[1] speak of *community-led* projects.
For the last 6-7 years we got financial and organizational stability. We are now financially stable worldwide movement. That's great achievement.
The price which we paid for that is quite large. Most importantly, we lost the momentum along with the initial enthusiasm.
In the ideal world, we wouldn't have lost the momentum. In the ideal world, community would be capable to fix the holes made by leadership and management.
However, we are not living in the ideal world. Besides some drawback, the positive thing of not living in the ideal world is it's inherent feature that you can change it.
Because of that, I am very happy to see somebody with courage and integrity in the top management. Such person has much larger potential to create the momentum and build community enthusiasm again.
On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 3:02 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
So while I agree with your sentiment, that leaders must model values such as courage and integrity, I think it would have been better expressed without the ringing endorsement of Che Guevara. As you say, we should choose our words carefully and ensure that our language is positive and inclusive. This is obviously an area where we can all make progress.
Nathan, the fact that Damon is likely a trot who quotes Che Guevara is as good as the fact that Jimmy is an objectivist (or, at least, was at the time of creation of Wikipedia). You can't be a fundamentalist here. And as long as the ideology is dominantly secular, it's bringing to us not just diversity, but people with stronger motivation, which we badly need.