Liam Wyatt wrote: >I've always believed that Wikimedia is an education charity that happens >to exist exists in a technology field. I often note in presentations that >I give that the Wikimedia vision statement does NOT use the words, >Internet, or Wiki, or Encyclopedia. But these appointments indicate the >Board and WMF Executive believe Wikimedia is a technology charity that >happens to exists in the education field.
This is sort of nitpicky, but there's a somewhat important distinction between Wikimedia and the Wikimedia Foundation, though the two are obviously heavily related. Wikimedia is a global movement dedicated to creating free educational content and bringing it to the world. The San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation is a large player currently in this movement, mostly due to how fund-raising operates on Wikimedia wikis. You and I both know this, of course, but we should try to be precise, even if the naming is abominable. :-) >These appointments will make a crucial difference to how the new WMF >strategic direction will go - and clearly the leadership is wanting to >make us act more like a Californian dot-com and less like a global >education charity. Less "community consensus building" and more "move >fast and break things" - is the message I am reading here. The counter-argument: the numeric reality is that a sizable portion of Wikimedia Foundation staff is (and has always been) technology-related. If the Wikimedia Foundation continues to have, as Sue's "narrowed focus" put it, two primary focuses, engineering and grant-making, I think you'd expect/hope that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees would be experienced and competent in technology and financial administration. All that said, I don't really disagree with most of your e-mail. The diversity issue is one to always be mindful of. Your main point about what the Wikimedia Foundation is (technology organization in education or education organization in technology) is reasonable. There's <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Guiding_Principles>, but I think we're still looking at the larger issue identified in the "Something" thread: the vision for what the Wikimedia Foundation is going to do not in 100 years, but in the next 5 to 10 years, is missing. The other issue that I see, interwoven with the missing vision, is that the Wikimedia Foundation has ballooned in size and is an incredible outlier within the Wikimedia movement. It's time to consider bolstering the other Wikimedia chapters instead of continuing to create one super-chapter that's unreasonably and unmanageably large. It's time to treat the Wikimedia Foundation as we would Wikimedia California or Wikimedia United States and hold the Wikimedia Foundation to the same standards as we hold Wikimedia DC, Wikimedia DE, and all the others to. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
