This. What Risker said. Fae raises a fair point. And while the Foundation certainly does not make policy based off of small discussions on mailing list, it should (and used to) listen to those lists, and use them to aid in decisions about what policy to make.
I like you a lot Joseph, but I’m afraid your comment here was regrettable. Nobody here was suggesting that the foundation make that policy based off of the small group discussion, whether in a public mailing list or otherwise. However, a long time valued member of the community was raising a reasonable question. It deserves a better answer than that.
Respectfully, and with great fondness, Philippe
On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 4:49 PM Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
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@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. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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