Just as you say.
No threat to WMF if they don’t care about retaining the editing community.
If all else fails thy could just sell advertising
Cheers,
Peter
-----Original Message-----
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tim
Landscheidt
Sent: Saturday, 02 January 2016 8:16 AM
To: wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board
"Peter Southwood" <peter.southwood(a)telkomsa.net> wrote:
I agree.
The situation may well be metastable, in that the WMF may get away
with alienating the crowd for a long time, until it reaches a tipping
point, when the reaction becomes catastrophic and non-reversible. At
which point there will be a large number of people who will say they
told them so, but it may well be too late to reassemble the debris.
Something will survive , but maybe not Wikipedia as we know it. How
far we are from the tipping point is anybody's guess. At present the
vast majority of the crowd are probably totally unaware of the
problems, but I personally would not bet the survival of Wikipedia
against them staying and continuing to produce for free if there was a
major walkout by the volunteers who currently keep the show on the
road. Will the level of donations remain viable if the general public
witnesses a meltdown? Would you bet on it?
[…]
That is irrelevant for threatening WMF. If at some point in time WMF would no longer
raise enough funds, its staff would just have to pick new jobs somewhere else (just like
all other employees do in a similar situation). Working at WMF probably has some
amenities, but noone bases their decisions on fears that as an effect their contract might
be termi- nated in ten or twenty years. Even less so do trustees plan that they can
replace their summer holiday with a trip to Wikimania till eternity.
And it's also irrelevant for writing an online encyclopedia.
You don't need the current level of funding as only a frac- tion actually goes to
expenditures necessary for /that/, and if you have viewers, you will have (more than
sufficient) donations.
So while a reaction may be "catastrophic and non-re- versible", if the possible
effect is a minor nuisance at worst, then it cannot be a motivating factor.
Tim
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