We have built up an amazing amount of good will. When we raise money we spend some of that good will. Unless we have something worth spending it on, no need to do so. We already have a lot of professional fact checkers. I for example am a professional and check a lot of facts :-) Cochrane has also just hired someone to help me.
With respect to what could benefit from more money:
1) Our readers want rich content. We need a team working on tools that allow our communities to create the rich content our readers have requested. I know this was something Yuri was working on but the team has unfortunately been disbanded.
2) The community tech team does great work. They have way more great ideas than they can solve. Would be good to see that team either doubled or tripled in size. Part of it could dedicated to issues from the Global south / language issues.
3) We have a partnership with Translators Without Borders and thus access to 1,000s of translator volunteers. Most do not want to learn and will not learn how to edit Wikipedia. I was personally paying a coordinator to manage the project however he now has a full time job as a high school teacher. I am looking for someone to replace him.
Our communities already donate to us billions of dollars worth of value a year (would be interesting to actually calculate this number if it has not been already calculated). Uptodate, another online medical encyclopedia, brings in about 2 billion dollars a year through subscriptions.
James
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 11:18 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
I love it, although I suspect that 1B wouldn't be enough. The industry of for-profit academic publishing is probably worth much more than that, and it won't give up easily.
Not that I don't support the general idea, but the resistance will be hard.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-05-17 21:02 GMT+03:00 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
With that amount of money, we could probably put an end on closed science in less than a decade, and make open access and open science the new standard. There's already a lot of efforts going on, but incumbent publishers are much more rich and resourceful. Lobbying, advocacy, outreach could do a lot, from our part. We are probably better equipped to coordinate bottom-up efforts (hackathons, tools and whatnot), and we would be better suited for the whole diplomatic/political/top-down side of it.
Making open science the new standard would be a goal to itself and
leverage
for other results. We'd end up with a lot more free content for Wikimedia projects, probably better advocacy and outreach for us in Universities and research centers. We would spread and promote the Mertonian norms of science¹, which are already our values. Also, there's a fair chance for this new open science standard to sustain itself, as in the current system scientists and researchers *already* do research, publish and review for free.² A new paradigm for science and research could also be very important for developing countries, in which scientists are often required to adequate to mainstream science (eg. they are not able to research areas which would benefit their local community, like local diseases).
Aubrey
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mertonian_norms ² of course they are paid by their institutions, but the "act of publishing" and the whole scholarship workflow is "embedded" and already paid for.
On Wed, May 17, 2017 at 7:38 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Heh, I remember Mr Wales asking what could the movement do with a
million
dollars some time around 2006. Is anything on the horizon?
What could we do? Many things; one of them would be to get our act
together
and become a true leader in software and content localization.
Currently
we
are proud about maintaining MediaWiki, a piece of software that is
probably
translated to more languages than any other, and that is great, but:
- Our software localization tooling, excellent as it is, didn't become
the
industry standard, even though it could with better packaging. Why is
it
important? Because a Wikipedia in a given language doesn't exist in isolation—it exists in an environment of other programs, sites,
platforms,
and media. There was a (relatively) thriving software localization community in the Catalan language already in the 1990s (!), so it's not surprising that Catalan Wikipedia was the first to start after English,
and
is among the most successful Wikimedia projects now. Making software localization better for everybody will bring computer usage to the
whole
world, and we can be the leaders in it, rather than leaving it to the corporations. 2. We have the theoretical ability to write articles in any language of
the
world, but not everybody actually does it. Some language communities
need
stronger nudges than others to get going: Training about translation
and
scientific writing, developing terminology, developing spelling dictionaries, developing keyboards that allow convenient typing,
literacy
programs, etc. In a lot of languages the Bible is the only published
book;
this happened thanks to donations from people who want to spread their religion around the world. If it can be done with the Bible, it can be
done
with an encyclopedia. 3. We are influencing public policy in the area of copyright law, but
we
should be influencing public policy around the whole world to make localized computing and content more accessible. Lobbying needs
resources.
See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Strategy/Wikimedia_ movement/2017/Cycle_2/A_Truly_Global_Movement#Governments_ and_computer_vendors:_Accessibility_to_localization_technology
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2017-05-17 20:08 GMT+03:00 David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com:
Are there any activities that could have a meaningful impact if we
ask
donors for such amount of seed money? Are there reasons to do so?
Do we have the guts to do so?
Do we have the organizational capital to handle it? Or can we get
there
soon?
Do we have the moral right to take a lead in the world and ask for as
much
resources as needed?
Is our leader and our members willing to take big undertakings?
Are most of us ready to live in fear while the values that we cherry
most
would crumble under our own eyes?
Would it matter much if we as a movement would disappear? Or is it a struggle always a positive answer against the shadows in the world?
Can we offer anything else in this world than truth, free knowledge,
and
an
open inclusive environment?
Would you take best wishes from a stranger like me?
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