James, you're right. I did back-of-the-envelope calculations last year, which don't bear scrutiny but are useful for ballparks. If you assume every word added to the projects is worth a dollar (it isn't, for a variety of reasons, but it's what professional journalists are often paid) -- then I believe volunteers contributed about 700 million dollars of work to the projects in 2008-09. I think --but am not sure-- that that number excluded talk pages.
It's not a number we would ever use publicly, because as I said it doesn't bear scrutiny -- but it does suggest that the value of editors' time vastly outweighs the value of donated cash. It's not a competition, and we value every contribution of any kind..... But it's obvious that in our unique context, editors are the main source of value, and the main contributors to impact. I liked that Zack understood that, and I liked that he wanted the organization to appropriately understand and value both types of contributors. (Not to mention contributions of code, PR work, organizational work, and so forth.) Thanks, Sue Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: James Alexander <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 22:54:45 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List<[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fwd: Announcing new Chief Global Development Officer and new Chief Community Officer On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Sue Gardner <[email protected]> wrote: > I am really happy to announce two important new Wikimedia Foundation > hires. Zack Exley will be Wikimedia's new Chief Community Officer, > and Barry Newstead will be our Chief Global Development Officer. Both > will start just before Wikimania, and will join us in Gdansk. > Aye grats both to the two new hires and to the Foundation they look like great choices. Without trying a risk a sidetrack to much: I have to agree with the idea of the fundraising being with everyone else here and I'm really happy to see that. With the possible exception of the major/foundation gifts (which you could I guess separate off but it would be odd to have them separate from the rest of fundraising I think) our donors OUR our community in all ways. Not only do our readers and editors donate themselves (from what I understand that is the majority (i.e the annual campaign) but also the volunteers themselves are donors at least in my mind even without any monetary support. Their time is what makes us good. James Alexander [email protected] [email protected] _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
