Off of Kelly Martin's blog:



And off of Cyde's blog: big changes, watch the tech news sites...

Should we start a pool and guess what it might be???

At first glance at that blog posting, I misread "the foundation that runs Wikipedia" as "the foundation that ruins Wikipedia".

I thought you said "misread."

That would be a Freudian slip-reading. (?)

This may be obvious, but I guess the way we have to look at this is what would really, really piss off the person that has and does still believe in the project. I can think of a couple little small things, but I'm having a hard time sorting these things into something that would be considered a Foundation specific change.

Apparently having the "inside scope" on scandals is the newest way to demonstrate social influence on WP.

Is that actually how the foundation is making policy decisions these days... by brainstorming about what decision would do the best job of pissing off whatever supporters they still have, for the purpose of losing them all so they can become a really exclusive private club?

Why not? They're the Wikimedia Foundation! They can do whatever they want, and if you complain, they'll kick your lousy ass!

Anyhoo, my guess (that's guess, with a "g") would be that the "big announcement" has something to do with stable versions on enwiki, or "flagged revisions" as they prefer to call it. The announcement is probably going to come from Erik himself - his first big "initiative" as Deputy Dawg.

If so, then it's probably a good thing, and IMO we should all look forward to it, even if a few WP'ers are totally against the idea. If not, well, it was just a guess.

Perhaps as of 1 January 2008, it's going to be renamed the Wikipedia Foundation just like Erik always wanted?

Well, made my guess.

It is also possible, of course, that Mr. Weys doesn't know anything, and will fit his super-secret prediction to the next big piece of news, whatever that might be.

Isn't the Foundation's budget around a million dollars a year, more or less? There are churches that are bigger than that. Probably this is first time in history that a million dollar a year charity can boast of having 10,000+ unpaid volunteers and a web site with billions of page views a month. Nothing like this has ever existed before. (Imagine how much it would have cost in 1990 for the Red Cross to coordinate thousands of volunteer blood drives, or for the Salvation Army just to send letters to last year's kettle ringers asking them to sign up for the new season.)

The problem is that up until now they have made decisions like a small charity (and a million a year is a small charity). They're bigger and more influential than their budget would indicate. They're an aircraft carrier being piloted by the "captain" of a 14-foot charter fishing boat.

Brilliantly put.

Still, not to worry - the new Arbcom will ensure that things are run better, won't it?

Well said.

Y'know, if I were a proper conspiracy theorist with a narcissistic bent (and who's to say I'm not, eh?), I'd almost say these leaks are deliberate, and we're the victim, not them.

See, what happens is that we get threads like this, with titles like "Get ready for another shocker" or "Something's up in Wikiland" or whatever. And then the actual scandal gets put into that thread, so that people coming here to read about it will have a harder time finding it, because they're looking for a title based on the actual scandal that just occurred.

They might also have figured out that there have been a lot of complaints from members about my earlier tendency to change thread titles without asking anyone. I've since stopped doing that, so maybe they're taking unfair advantage.

So I'm thinking it's "executive decision" time, as one of our old friends used to say. First, I want to encourage everyone to start new, non-pre-speculative threads once a new scandal is revealed, and just post a link to the new thread from the initial one. Then I'm going to change thread titles just for those threads to at least partially indicate what ended up being the big deal they were going on about. Other moderators, please do likewise...

Dammit, they're not going to put one over on us!

Clever bastards...

No doubt the leaks are intentional, but I find it hard to believe that anyone is gaming the leaks so as to manipulate the thread titles here, especially since the threads all have subtitles that the admins can tweak at will.

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful site,
Started by one Jimbo Wales
One cold and stormy night.

Now Jimbo the pornographer,
With Sanders by his side,
With articles on Pokemon,
To fortune they would ride, to fortune they would ride.

Reputation and consistency
Meant nothing to Jimbo.
A million monkeys typing meant
His site would surely blow, his site would surely blow.

So now it is one big encyclopedia,
With JZG,
Fred Bauder too,
SlimVirgin and Jayjg,
Durova
The professor and Mary Ann,
Here on Wiki-peed-ya!

OK, that's pretty awful -- please improve.

That's not controversial at all! I was thinking more along the lines of advertisements...wasn't that one of Danny's ideas?

Putting myself in Cyde's position, and what I know about Cyde, I think that would piss him off ...but who knows. I tend to take Cyde at his word that something is going on. It certainly would not be out of character for the foundation, given recent events.

I doubt Cyde of all people would do things to tweak us or game whatever; it's not his style.

If most other people said "LOOK OUT! IT'S COMING!" I'd take it, whatever it was, with a potential grain of salt. For Cyde to say it adds some value to that.

Wikipedia has to make some corrective and adaptive changes to survive. Whether any such forthcoming changes are sufficient and salutary remains to be seen. I suppose it depends on how well those instituting the changes can game the Darwinian drama of survival of the fittest in the post-modern age of Internet economics.