Well, I think perhaps Fae's question may be considered more generally. Fae
is knowledgeable about the structure of the Wikimedia movement as well as
the WMF, and I think it might be best to work from the assumption that
their core question is probably more along the lines of whether (and how)
the current long-term strategy development process will, in fact, make
recommendations that are in line with ensuring that there will be (at
minimum) a publicly accessible archive of the Wikimedia projects.
The movement strategy process is very broad, and contains a lot of diverse
ideas about how the movement/WMF/chapters/other entities/projects can be
improved, maintained, developed and supported. I'm pretty deep in the
strategy stuff, and as far as I know, at this point there's no clear path
to maintaining (or dissolving) any of the existing structures; more to the
point, there's no guarantee that the final summary recommendations of the
combined strategy groups will continue to support the current WMF mission
statement - that is, the part that says " [t]he [Wikimedia] Foundation will
make and keep useful information from its projects available on the
internet free of charge, in perpetuity."
I don't think that's really a bad question to ask - in fact, it may be one
of the more important ones. I hope I am not presuming too much, but I
think Fae is saying that this is something that is really important and
valuable, and that continuity/perpetuation of that particular aspect of the
mission statement should be a recommendation that gets included in the
final reports - regardless of which entity assumes responsibility for it or
who pays for it.
Risker/Anne
On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 18:03, Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The Internet Archive, incidentally, already seems to
maintain copies of
Wikimedia projects. I don't know to what degree of fidelity. Additionally,
the WMF's core deliverable is already to provide and sustain access to its
projects. It has an endowment for that purpose already. Other websites and
media that might have ephemeral access due to their nature as short-term
tools need the IA to be preserved, but the WMF's projects seem to occupy a
different space. It's sort of like asking if the Library of Congress needs
to invest in some external project to preserve and organize its
collections. No, that is its actual raison d'etre.
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