Hoi, You are entitled to an opinion and you may voice it and so am I. The Wikimedia Foundation is not a democracy and neither is our movement. This was done with deliberation. At best our movement is represented in the board and through its chapters. In essence the main function of the WMF is to ensure that the servers serve. That they serve optimally. As a consequence they maintain the code base of MediaWiki and associated software. As a result there have been several improvements in the responsiveness of the software. There have been improvements in the amount of energy our servers use. And frankly, that is their business and it is none of the business of the community. It is their business because it translates in the amount the servers take to serve, in the amount it takes to transport the data and in the amount of energy to display it on a screen. This reduces costs and it is a good investment as improvements will serve us well as we move forward. It is also a fiduciary duty of the Foundation to use the monies it gets well
Given that our movement is not a democracy, I find it operates very much in a democratic way. At that it functions remarkably well representing the needs of our communities particularly when you compare it with some nation states. The Foundation serves its purpose well and even though I am well known to be critical, if you care to, you will find that I am supportive of what the Foundation does in the big picture. It is impossible to make everybody happy and, it does imho a good job within the parameters of what is possible to them. That includes people in a community who feel abandoned when they are told to share "their" toys. Thanks, GerardM
On Tue, 8 Oct 2019 at 00:36, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
Gerard, you assume that "my wikipedia" is the only project I participate in? Let me assure you this is not the case. On the contrary, the last few years I mostly contributed to Wikidata and recently - a massive Wiktionary lexeme import, and very little to Wikipedia.
That said, I think removing the last actionable and visible community check on WMF is a mistake for the reasons I outlined before. We the community (people who contribute to the open knowledge, who actually created the knowledge that now generates all those donations) should have at least some measurable input into how WMF spends those resources and priorities its projects. WMF can say "we believe that free knowledge means we must spend 99% of the donations towards global warming, because one cannot have free knowledge without the planet on which to live" (a bit of a straw man argument, but it illustrates my point) -- and there is no community input short of a Global protect or a Spanish-wiki-style revolt where the whole community decides to move to a different platform for the feedback to get across.
My point is -- in a democracy, if a large crowd is on the streets, the government has already messed up. And the way to avoid it is to have a well functioning feedback mechanism that can early-on tell WMF what the "constituents" would like it to do. We currently do NOT have any way for donators to say what they want the money to be spend on. We currently do NOT have any way for community to do the same. Thus, its a self-driving ship -- the inmates are running the asylum.
On Sun, Oct 6, 2019 at 12:50 AM Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com
wrote:
The disappointing you show and the grotesque conclusions are imho based
in
a sense of entitlement. You had it your way for so long and they are now robbing you from your cookies... It is easy to "forget" that a program where a majority decides what is on a "community wish list" favours the biggest projects. It is easy to forget that the WMF has many projects and your Wikipedia is only one out of over 250 and, there are the "other" projects as well.
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