Thanks for the reply! Especially from an official WMF Community and Audience Engagement Associate.
Can we take it from your defensive email it is a fact that the WMF has no known long term archive strategy?
By the way, in your apparent opinion we may be unimportant people on an email list, but we have a long history of taking the initiative to fundamentally shape the WMF, and not that long ago took action that ensured a board member resigned and the WMF establish radically different good governance practices. Not a bad record for loner unpaid volunteers.
Thanks in advance, Fae
On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 18:38, Joseph Seddon jseddon@wikimedia.org wrote:
Because the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't make long term strategic decisions based off of a 4 person discussion on a mailing list.
I really don't know why people keep being surprised by this.
Seddon
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 6:11 PM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
I saw a recent size estimate of Wikimedia Commons of just over 200 TB. That's large but not astronomical.
With a bit of guesstimation, the hardware only cost of creating a Wikimedia projects digital tape archive might be around $2,000 per archive set, a cost that probably would only be once a year. Using off-the-shelf kit, a similar archive on a set of 10 TB hard disks might end up being double that cost. Archives like this are good for a few years, but in practice a plan would have them periodically tested and refreshed, unless they are being replaced every year with the latest archive.
It is unclear to me why the WMF would not want to make a hearty transparent and public commitment to off-site archives. At least with an independently managed archive in another country, that at least makes it possible that in some bizarre scenario where an extremist US government makes it a federal crime to fail to either 'amend' the Wikimedia database against the values of the WMF, or legally orders the WMF to take down its websites in order to control certain publications, videos or photographs, that WMF employees can appropriately comply with US federal law, but are not be required to do anything about the public archive hosted by a different organization in another country. If such an unlikely scenario came to pass (and the unexpected seems to becoming something to realistically plan for these days), at least the archive could be resurrected for public access within a few weeks by open knowledge organizations who have staff that would never be subject to federal law in the US.
If the WMF honestly does not already do something like this already, and wanted to earmark the relatively trivial sum of $10,000/year for remote archives, us volunteers would be happy to approach a couple of suitable national-level partners in Europe that could easily physically host the archives each year and would probably like the idea of blogging about it, as protecting open knowledge fits their values and commitments.
Any WMF board members interested in asking some questions internally, if the WMF senior management are unwilling to answer this rather simple question publicly?
Thanks, Fae -- faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 14:36, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I think that raising the question here is fine. I also think that it is more WMF's responsibility to be responsive than community members' responsibility to guess where and how to ask questions.
In general (this is not intended as a criticism of you, Dan) my view is that WMF has a very mixed record on responsiveness. Some employees and board members repeatedly go above and beyond the call of duty, while
other
employees and board members ignore repeated questions, and some people
are
in between. The first group seems to me to deserve a lot of credit, while second group comes across to me as disrespectful and lazy. I have previously complained about problems with responsiveness to multiple managers in WMF, and unfortunately that has not resulted in widespread improvements that I have observed. I think that the problem may have more to do with organizational culture and lack of will than with lack of capacity. Let me emphasize that unresponsiveness is not a problem with everyone in WMF, but I think that it is a significant problem and I know
of
no excuses for it.
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Tue, May 7, 2019, 10:50 Dan Garry (Deskana) djgwiki@gmail.com
wrote:
On Tue 7 May 2019 at 11:04, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
I am sure this Wikimedia wide community run list is a perfectly good
place
to check whether the WMF has any commitment to long term public
archives,
or not.
Thanks for your advice as to where to go, but the strategy process
groups
are undoubtedly a worse place to ask this question and expect a
verifiable
answer.
I see! Then I will defer to your clear expertise in getting definitive answers. I look forward to seeing the outcome!
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