Something else came into my mind, speaking of empirical results of closed vs. open platforms:
The Wikimedia CH members wiki, which has been our website for a while, actually started as a members wiki! For around two or three years we had a Wordpress website + the members wiki which was closed and only accessible for members. Guess what happened - nobody used it. It remained dormant until the board decided to give up the members wiki and use a wiki platform for the website at the same time. Then we moved the wiki to be the new website and rebuilt the content. Now with the new website the wiki became the members wiki again, but yet not closed and not rebuild. I am in favour a rebuild, I am not completely opposing a closure for members but made my statements based on my actual experience with this matter. WMDE has a closed members wiki since around a year. It is not used very much because it is an administrative overhead to get an account, get the account recognised as a member etc. But it is definitely not dead and is worth having. On the other hand WMDE never had - in the contrary to WMCH and WMAT - any member participation platform other than the mailinglist before. And, just as a sidenote: There is no financial data which is not already published anyway and definitely no contact information - this is just impossible. /Manuel -- Regards Manuel Schneider Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge www.wikimedia.ch _______________________________________________ http://wikimedia.ch Wikimedia CH website Wikimediach-l mailing list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediach-l
