Whatever I may think of some of the recent actions of the board,
I think its present role goes well beyond
" bring stability and assure that
the daily business is done: keep the platform online, deal with legal
cases and keep a positive financial balance. "
The key roles are to ensure the quality of WP, and
" to lead 'in a political manner' " the open information movement.
First, it it does have the power to deal with a situation where"Let's
say, a specific Wikipedia would be in trouble - maybe there are reports
that it was taken over by a small group of POV-pushers. "
It has control of the trademark, and the ability to prevent any particular
WP from using it. It cannot prevent any aberrant group from using our
material while calling itself something else, but it can prevent it calling
itself Wikipedia.
True, this may not be effective in some cases as it used to be, before some
of the individual language chapters had developed organizational and
financial resources of their own, to the extent that some of them could
well persist as the major free encyclopedia in their language communities
even without the WP name
Second, when dealing with the ongoing threats to free information, the WMF
can and does effectively speak for all those interested as perhaps the best
known and the strongest voice. This is not something to be regarded
lightly. It can organize the greatest general public indignation that any
one organization can, and it can coordinate and act asa center for the work
of others. Much as all languages in the world need a good free
encyclopedia, all the people in the world need this freedom even more.
On the other hand, it is not needed financially--many other groups in the
movement can successfully raise sufficient money to keep the whole
operation going, if not to maintain the present number of programers
working on ancillary projects
On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 11:20 AM, Dariusz Jemielniak <dar...@alk.edu.pl>
wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Am I the only one who would rather see an independent body represent the
> > communities than one subordinate to the Board?
>
>
> My concern is that in the long run such a body may lead to excluding
> community representation from the Board ("since we have a community body
> already..."). Also, I think that we're lacking a senate, not a government
> per se.
>
> dj
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--
David Goodman
DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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