Hi Craig, Amir, and Nat,
On 2016-02-19 00:13, Craig Franklin wrote:
Yaroslav,
You're correct in that most volunteers don't care directly. The
problem is
that a lot of the BoT's recent difficulties have crossed the line from
"angry encyclopedia people venting on a mailing list" to "serious and
negative attention from the mainstream press". If there is too much of
the
latter, it may create a perception amongst the general public than even
if
Wikipedia is a useful resource, that it is incompetent with handling
money. As a result, donations dry up, and difficult and unpleasant
choices
have to be made around budget.
So yes, this sort of thing can influence rank and file editors most
seriously, albeit indirectly.
Cheers,
Craig
Whereas you are absolutely right, I actually have two very simple
points.
One is that in the big picture, servers were running ten years ago on a
budget which is thousand times less than the current WMF budget. And
unless someone screws up badly they would still be running in ten years
from now. Most people use the servers to see content, and most of them
want to look up the English Wikipedia. People who add this content -
volunteers - are largely independent of the funding, and the vast
majority of them do not even know that WMF exists. Sure, it would be
very unfortunate to lose the development momentum, to lose GLAMS and
similar things, but this is kind of luxury. Volunteers large live not
because WMF screws up or because funding dries out; they leave because
they burn out, move to a different period in their life, or, well, die.
My point is that even if funding is severely reduced, it would be very
unfortunate, but this is not yet the end of the world.
The second one refers to Leila's statement that she is more afraid for
volunteers than for the staff. My point is that actually staff
(including Leila herself) which suffer most from the ongoing disruption,
and if one needs to protect someone (I am not sure it is needed) it
should be staff, not volunteers.
For the record, I do not have any opinion on who is right and who is
wrong here. I do not have enough information, and I do not have a habit
making uninformed statements. Again, in the big picture this is
irrelevant; what is relevant is that some disruption is going on, which
definitely has an impact on the movement.
Cheers
Yaroslav
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