Kevin Gorman wrote: > Regarding the IA: they have a significant interest in working with the > Wikimedia projects, a lot more experience than the Wikimedia projects have > caching absolutely tremendous quantities of data, a willinness to handle a > degree of legal risk that would be inappropriate for the Wikimedia projects > to take on....
Because they censor things retroactively when requested by new domain owners' robots.txt, and apparently immediately comply with essentially all take-down requests regardless of merit, which would not be appropriate for the project described at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Caching_References IA's legality in general has apparently never been tested in court, but the Foundation's use of fair use resources has repeatedly withstood such tests. The Wayback Machine API is so slow that waiting editors to sit through it as part of the reflinks process would be absurd, and repeated requests for the Foundation to assist them and WebCitation.org over the years have been met with silence. The Foundation should be asserting the Feist v. Rural and Field v. Google rights described at the link above, without spending orders of magnitude more than is necessary on involuntary government surveillance-enabled name brand equipment from manufacturers Andrew Gray wrote, regarding the proposed community strategy survey including participation-related goals: > responses tend to be along the lines of "no, that's > inappropriate" or "no, that's irrelevant" On the contrary, about two fifths of the responses so far have expressed support. > Almost every issue on that political survey is irrelevant > to most of our work - I suppose you could make a case > for "metropolitan broadband", which might be relevant One of the objections from a few months ago was to that specific issue, highlighting the need for an actual survey to be performed instead of remaining willfully ignorant of community preferences. I am skeptical that anyone in our community is satisfied with such willful ignorance. > and irrelevant to the specific question of volunteer participation. On the contrary, if we can reduce the costs of participation we can expect participation to increase. This is not a "second or third-order effect," it is a direct effect. > to divert resources into one or the other those topics, > is frankly insulting to our donors and volunteers, who > have signed up to support something entirely different They signed up to support our mission, which explicitly includes empowering people. The Foundation is not involved in large-scale international trade, but we involve ourselves with trade treaty negotiations when they will impact the ability of our volunteers to accomplish their tasks because that is in fact part of our mission. > why are you so confident that Wikipedians are *for* all of these things? Because all of them are likely to increase the amount of time potential volunteers have to contribute. Do we have respect for those volunteers' time, or do we only give them lip service? If the original European strategy survey included a broader range of ideas for increasing participation, they likely would have ranked them similarly to how self-selected respondents have at http://www.allourideas.org/wmfcsdraft/results But there is only one way to find out, and the community deserves inquiry instead of turning our backs on them and seeking willing ignorance of their preferences. When I was the only person supporting paying Foundation employees a competitive wage, there was nothing but vocal and strenuous opposition until it was done. Often that opposition involved mean-spirited personal attacks and sarcasm. What reason to I have to expect that this situation will not resolve similarly, when there is abundant and obvious support forthcoming, including messages to this list, one of which was sent immediately prior to Andrew's? > Wikimedia has a goal we have chosen to adopt "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." Not to sit idly by while austerity and tax havens destroy access to education and the free volunteer time necessary for the community to efficiently improve the projects. > and a general method we have developed to try and achieve it. That method is not set in stone, and the community deserves a voice in how the Foundation prioritizes the many ways that they can support them. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
