"Peter Southwood" peter.southwood@telkomsa.net wrote:
You are quite correct, we cannot force the board to respond. However if they don't we are free to vote with our feet - or not. The fundamental rule of crowdsourcing is 'do not alienate your crowd'. They tread a delicate line, whatever they do is going to annoy somebody. […]
By mid-December, they had crowdsourced USD 18.000.000 in this campaign, so they seem to be on the right track. If volunteer editors would leave in a significant number, the effect would be the same that we have seen for MediaWiki development: "We need to raise /more/ money to employ some- one to edit and update articles. You want to keep Wikipedia alive, don't you?"
All threats against the board or WMF in general are power- less unless there is a viable alternative to Wikipedia for volunteers that is /better/; at the moment there is not even a clone that provides just the same data.
Tim