2009/3/20 Mike Godwin <[email protected]>: >> If we have, let's say, 10.000.000 of contributors and 1% of them >> (100.000) is not happy with Wikipedia because of any reason and 1% of >> them (1000) want to sue WMF or whoever and 1% of them can do it, we'll >> have 10 big problems. We may fail in just 10% of the cases and we'll >> suffer from significant consequences. > > > This is a version of Pascal's Wager. I don't really believe, however, the > risk is even as high as you suggest here. We'll be fine.
Pascal's Wager involves infinite gain/loss - this is just basic risk analysis and has nothing at all to do with Pascal's Wager. I think the percentages given as plausible, but do we really have 10 million contributors? The English Wikipedia apparently has 9,237,657 registered users, but I believe a very large proportion of them have never made an edit, an even larger proportion won't have any edits which still exist in articles. I find it very unlikely that there are 10 million contributors, even across all Wikimedia projects, that have copyrightable contributions. (Of course, I'm ignoring anons - I don't see how they can realistically sue for copyright infringement.) So I think the expected number of problematic cases is significantly less than 1, but it certainly isn't 0. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
