Hoi,
Our community, movement and our foundation is pretty darn good. When you
consider all the imperfections, there is after all room for improvement, it
is really amazing how much is achieved on such a shoestring budget. We pay
the prize for under-investing in our organisation, in our infrastructure.
Our "primary" systems however are pretty stable.
My point is not that we should lose our ethos but that we should be more
smart about it. It is only fairly recently that we have the talent to
really improve the basics of our infra structure. We now have our systems
in multiple professional locations, The guts of MediaWiki is changing in
more than one way. Wikidata will make a splash in 2015. As it is, it is has
so much room for growth. The biggest amount of data will arrive from the
bigger projects however, the biggest potential is in the 250 other
languages that we support.
Yes, there are plenty individual stories that suck. But our projects will
never be like Nupedia. Some people have to revisit what we learned. One of
the lessons was that we can be and should be daring and innovative. Not
heeding this lesson is what will most likely do us in.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 30 November 2014 at 15:23, rupert THURNER <rupert.thur...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> hi mz,
>
> you are right, the whole wikipedia is built by volunteer time and
> could have not been built otherwise. so volunteer time clearly is
> worth significantly more. i sometimes feel ripped off as a volunteer.
> first i donate my time, and then people approach me to addtionally
> spend money for a conference, like last year in geneva 250eur for an
> open knowledge conference. or i want to meet a person who is not
> wealthy enough to pay her trip to london within the UK, and there is
> no way to get her a 100 gbp, as happend last year. wmf is not capable
> - i should have planned this a year in advance. wmch would be flexible
> enough but a different country and punished by WMF for beeing
> flexible. wmuk does not have a budget for such a strange thing, and it
> should have known it in advance as well.
>
> so where should this money come from? the easiest and cheapest is:
> take the money from the website. coupled with a more flexible,
> localised spending scheme. so WMCH or WMUK could pay this without
> headache. but WMF does not want this. out of 60 mio usd income, 52 mio
> or 86% is spent by the wikimedia foundation, yearly increasing. and
> most of it is spent in the united states.
>
> some time in future even wmf persons will recognize that if i would be
> perfectly organized and most intelligent person in the world i would
> use zero time for wikipedia. i'd instead sell my time as expensive as
> possible, and i'd be rich as bill gates. the foundation, and even some
> chapters, give the impression only perfect persons are good enough for
> them. or, even worse, treat them deliberatly like cattle. the core of
> its movement with it turns away, as those people are not good enough.
> and as bill gates and the other perfect persons will not contribute,
> nobody will. so we are back on field one, nupedia. jimbo has his
> personal foundation which will honor him even when he is dead,
> financed by one of the worlds largest websites. the foundation pays
> 1000 persons to keep it running. no volunteers necessary.
>
> rupert
>
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2014 at 3:36 AM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
> > Wikimedia always accepts donations. If the Wikimedia Foundation can't
> > figure out a way to easily accept monetary donations from Dutch
> > Wikimedians, why not simply focus efforts on non-monetary donations?
> > Edits and other wiki contributions are far more valuable, in my opinion.
> > Wikimedia Nederland seems to already be doing a lot of great work
> > encouraging these types of contributions (e.g., Wiki Loves [X]). :-)
> >
> > For the past few years I've seen it as fairly low-hanging fruit to create
> > a tongue-in-cheek "don't donate to Wikipedia" or "donate time instead" or
> > similar campaign. Or even register "DonateToWikipedia.org" and send
> > visitors to the edit form of an article that needs love. When people ask
> > me in real-life about donating to Wikipedia (nobody knows what Wikimedia
> > is), I typically suggest making a few edits instead of donating money
> > directly. I don't think the Wikimedia Foundation really needs the money
> > and I think volunteer time is worth significantly more.
> >
> > MZMcBride
> >
> >
> >
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