On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 1:06 AM, MZMcBride <[email protected]> wrote:
> Experiments are acceptable... sometimes. MZM, I didn't expect you to become the voice of conservatism! I cannot agree with your premise that experiments are somehow 'optional' or new. Experimentation is the lifeblood of any project build around being bold and low barriers to participation. We should simply ensure that boldness can be reverted, with fast feedback loops, and that experiments are just that, not drastic changes all at once. > Wikimedia's stated mission is about producing free, high-quality educational > content. It's funny, you've said this three times so far this thread :-) But if you read the mission again, I think you'll find you are mistaken. Wikimedia's mission is to *empower and engage people* to develop content. There's nothing about quality, unless you assume that an empowered and engaged society will produce high quality materials. (As it turns out, in practice if not in theory, we do.) Our goal is global engagement of creators; and providing infrastructure to empower their work. > At some point this jargon about "the movement" came along and > there's a huge focus on "building the movement." See above; this isn't new. We are a community dedicated to organizing and sharing knowledge; not the knowledge itself. That's what 'movement' means for us. We have produced some great collections over time, yes; who doesn't love Wikispecies, now the most thorough collection of its kind? But we have also produced translation networks, global citation standards, new social norms and standards for sharing, proposed national policy in countries everywhere; and have inspired a new generation of creators and sharers. We aren't replicating what high-quality publishing houses have done for centuries, just under a free license... We are doing something fundamentally different in scale, decentralization, motivation, and flexibility. There are many things we can learn from old models of collaboration; but giving up ease of experimentation and warning off newbies aren't among them. > the arguably more important goal of improving the content (a focus on > quality)? I do support those who focus on the quality of our existing content. But other priorities -- from expanding content scope and formats, to expanding the editing community -- also deserve support. SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
