Is it just me, or is this one of the worst pieces of prose I have ever read?

With an army of would-be Shakespeares and grammatical copy-editing pedants, all willing to work for nothing, all available to Wales and Snow, you'd have thought they have done better. Not only is the content pretentious and moronic, the grammar is atrocious and the language incredibly clichéd.

Take the opening line:

"It is hard to believe that less than a decade ago, Wikipedia didn't exist."

1) No, it is not.
2) "less than a decade" could be any time short of it. For most of that time wikipedia did exist, unfortunately. I think they meant to say "only a decade ago wikipedia didn't exist."
3) Why the comma?

As for: "Although we have accomplished a lot, we still have far to go to achieve our vision of a world in which every single person can freely share in the sum of all human knowledge." I won't even get started.

I'm sure everyone Jimmy showed it to told him that it was the best thing they'd ever read. That's what happens when you surround yourself with sycophantic yes-men and push away anyone who dares question the wisdom of the God-King.

I don't suppose that was the version written for Simple English Wikipedia...

I haven't actually read the letter. It didn't seem necessary to me.

These guys should try the wjhonson vocabulary builder-upper.

the comma is ok, but yeah, I might have written this differently.

They do some things I dislike technically, too, like putting the letter in a fixed-pixel-width box instead of letting it be flexible to different screen resolutions and window sizes, and leaving out the trailing slash in their links to http://volunteer.wikimedia.org/volunteer/ so that there is an unnecessary extra server redirection.

No. "There was a time, less than a decade ago, when Wikipedia did not exist" would be right, though of course there were other times (billions of years of them), more than a decade ago, when Wikipedia did not exist.

It kind of reminds me of an old "entertainment while waiting in line" thing they had going back in the 1980's at the Magic Kingdom's Space Mountain. While you snaked your way slowly to the top of the dark mountain to ride the roller coaster, there were these cheesy dioramas recessed in the walls that you would look at in boredom, waiting for the line to inch forward. There would be momentary voice-overs, running on a tape-loop, so that there'd be one of about three possible narratives, every 40 seconds or so. My favorite was:

"Many spirali galaxies exist... beyond the planet Mars..."

And there was such dramatic emphasis on the "beyond the planet Mars", as if it was astounding to think that any significant astronomical feature could POSSIBLY be that far away.

Good times, good times.

Also: Ten years ago, thousands of people were creating web pages on free-page hosts like Geocities, Angelfire, and others, and posting mountains of obscure information. Some of it was utter crap, some of it was valuable (a few items are no longer available online anywhere, at any price). Wikipedia has replaced some of that---with a probably-similar proportion of useful-to-crap information.

I recall a guy's Geocities page that was full of rare information on Geiger-Mueller tubes, plus how to make them, plus data sheets for G-M tubes, including a number of versions that are no longer made. His website disappeared in 1999 when Geocities was bought out by Yahoo, which decided to kill off many hundreds of thousands of sites.

And what's on Wikipedia about G-M tubes? Not much.

Does anyone else think the lack of a date on the letter is deliberate?

Also, the reference to "hundreds of thousands of volunteers" is deceptive - they can't prove that any particular percentage of accounts refer to discrete individual persons. Admittedly, the number may be over 100,000, but I doubt it's over 200,000, and it could be much smaller than 100,000.

And to make matters worse, the word "today" in the sentence that begins:...would be extraneous even if it were accurate. And that same sentence ends with:...which is obviously a monumental understatement. It might be acceptable if they excised the word "fully," though...

Last but not least, this sentence:...is also misleading. It should read more like this:

At least they used a spell-checker...

A high proportion of them will have made only a handful of edits. How many accounts (never mind people) have made more than 250 constructive edits to articles?

Good question. According to this page, the 4,000th-ranked WP'er in terms of number of overall edits has about 9,000 edits. If we make a simple eye-check average of the "Top 100" (or "Worst 100," if you prefer), which IMO would be about 100,000 edits, and extrapolate from there down to 9,000, with curve (because otherwise you'd get to zero very quickly), I believe you'd probably reach the users with 500 total edits by the time you got to around the 25,000 mark. If we assume that a typical WP'er has about 50 percent mainspace edits, then IMO you'd have between 20K and 30K "volunteers" who would fit that criteria. At the same time, you'd reach 5-10 edits well before you got to the user ranked at 200K by number of edits - probably before the one ranked at 100K.

Unfortunately, to know more precisely than that would probably require a database dump. Also, as a disclaimer, I should say that I was never all that good at math, though I'm sort of good at ballpark estimates...

Anyway, if I'm right, this would tend to suggest that while it may be perfectly acceptable for them to claim "tens of thousands of volunteers," or even "over a hundred thousand volunteers," the claim hundreds of thousands is almost certainly an exaggeration.