Other than the fellowships, which I'll come back to in a moment, I think Sue's new course for the WMF makes a lot of sense. The WMF has been the subject of a lot of valid criticism in the last few years around its goals, spending and achievements. Despite soaring budgets and an FTE trend to delight any bureaucrat, measurable positive impacts have been few and far between. Glamorous international efforts and experiments in organizational management might please their respective stakeholders and beneficiaries, but they have had questionable benefit for what is supposed to be the WMF's core mission. Perhaps in an attempt to be all things in this "movement", the WMF has lagged at being what it truly ought to be - an effective, innovative manager for an ecosystem of web-based knowledge references.
There's no margin in ignoring the fact that steadily dropping editor involvement is a serious challenge for the future of Wikimedia. We don't really understand what's causing this drop, and we're suffering from a lack of ideas on how to solve it. There's a place for small-bore efforts like training small groups of people on how to use our projects, but they are too low impact for a big scale problem. Yet I haven't seen big efforts at innovating solutions. Beyond Vector and the abuse filter, what attempts have been made to solve the big problems? Or even to understand them? Why can Reddit and other massive userbase sites keep their community and continue to grow, while Wikimedia can't? Is it that we're too hard to use? Too much has already been done? Are the communities not open enough? Too bound by rules and standards and a conservative ethic of interaction? This is where I think fellowships are useful and should continue; they are an opportunity to incubate innovative solutions and improvements to the problems we face, and to generate insight into what those problems are. I don't have the answers, and I don't think Wikimedia does either. Narrowing the organizational focus to more tightly concentrate on these issues sounds like a great idea; keeping on as it has been sounds like arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
