I agree. The situation may well be metastable, in that the WMF may get away with alienating the crowd for a long time, until it reaches a tipping point, when the reaction becomes catastrophic and non-reversible. At which point there will be a large number of people who will say they told them so, but it may well be too late to reassemble the debris. Something will survive , but maybe not Wikipedia as we know it. How far we are from the tipping point is anybody's guess. At present the vast majority of the crowd are probably totally unaware of the problems, but I personally would not bet the survival of Wikipedia against them staying and continuing to produce for free if there was a major walkout by the volunteers who currently keep the show on the road. Will the level of donations remain viable if the general public witnesses a meltdown? Would you bet on it? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tim Landscheidt Sent: Thursday, 31 December 2015 9:20 PM To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Announcement about changes to the Board "Peter Southwood" <peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote: > You are quite correct, we cannot force the board to respond. However > if they don't we are free to vote with our feet - or not. The > fundamental rule of crowdsourcing is 'do not alienate your crowd'. > They tread a delicate line, whatever they do is going to annoy > somebody. > […] By mid-December, they had crowdsourced USD 18.000.000 in this campaign, so they seem to be on the right track. If volunteer editors would leave in a significant number, the effect would be the same that we have seen for MediaWiki development: "We need to raise /more/ money to employ some- one to edit and update articles. You want to keep Wikipedia alive, don't you?" All threats against the board or WMF in general are power- less unless there is a viable alternative to Wikipedia for volunteers that is /better/; at the moment there is not even a clone that provides just the same data. Tim _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> ----- No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2016.0.7294 / Virus Database: 4489/11298 - Release Date: 12/31/15 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
