The Wikimedia Foundation has released their 2010-2011 Annual Plan this week. A lot of talk about money, so I guess the overall goal is to move as much of it about as possible.

Some of the interesting bits from the risks appendix:

Movement roles? WTF are they? Better to implement say, an organisational structure? Like an editorial oversight committee for starters.



What, instead of developing a structure that attempts to avoid the scandal in the first place?

Here's the best bit though, from page 10:

What about a priority to ensure that the content you publish is not utter shite? Isn't that important? To that girl in Africa, if nobody else.

Sounds like they know something about the future of Flagged Revisions that you guys are just beginning to piece together.

Anything in there about adopting a Code of Ethics?

This is a major part of their problem: These people (being the only ones who are getting paid) have to pretend to see Wikipedia as a movement, like the "civil rights movement" or the "world peace movement." They're not being paid to see Wikipedia for what it actually is, i.e., a time-wasting activity for (mostly) bored, socially-inept teens and housewives that just happened to be in the right place at the right time when Google needed a way to prevent itself from being made useless by blogspam.

As for the "roles" in question, movements need leaders, organizers, and idealist proselytizers, but they also need propagandists, apologists, spin doctors, and snake-oil salesmen. I suspect they simply want to formalize these roles among the people they already have, to avoid needless duplication of effort.


The term "robust" is organizational code-speak, a shorthand if you will - it means "as far removed as possible from what's actually going on." They're fortunate in that the people who run the big foundations don't read the tech press, so all they really have to do to keep the dollars rolling in is flat-out lie to them.


This is also code-speak - it means "catch-all bucket for legal and consultancy fees."


"Administrative overhead." I mean, how are they supposed to do that, sitting in an office in San Francisco, forbidden to actually get down 'n' dirty with the users because of the need to maintain the Section 230-derived illusion that they're a "service provider, not a publisher"?


This one essentially means, "We couldn't have just two bullet points because that would look retarded, so we added this bit to pad our buzzword count."

It is hardly surprising that we should think that their direction is flawed, if it seems that their perception of key issues that they base this strategy on is hopelessly naive.


Don't see anything about libel, pornography or ethics there.

Most of that list quoted above doesn't even make sense, not even within its own hopelessly naive context. Particularly that last bit - who writes this material? "More complex to be an editor"? They think the user community needs more dumbing-down?

By the way, WMF folks, the English Wikipedia at least has plenty of age-diversity, and it doesn't do so badly on gender diversity or "global representation" compared to the rest of the internet. What it really lacks is diversity "in terms of" race/ethnicity, education level, and degree of affluence - not that it matters; it's not like they can change the demographics of the worldwide internet with a few bullet points.

The metric of success the Foundation has adopted for the editorial community is size. Simply put, the more people who edit, the better, as far as they are concerned. I have yet to understand how "more editors" leads to success in their nominal mission. I don't think they understand that either; on the other hand, I don't think they care, either.

Jimbo is very very upset that there are so few women involved in Wikipedia. True, the percentage of self-identified females editing Wikipedia is about the same as for the Internet as a whole, but that's not consistent with Jimbo's vision of his fanbase: he wants millions of screaming women all competing for his affections, as it were, and that's just not happening.

everyone's seen the boat pic right... does international waters have laws against sinking a boat you're actually on? pretty sure he has no idea who I am

^^^^ FBEYE THIS IS WHAT'S KNOWN AS JOKING

I will not quote platitudes, which means my quoting of the above (initial post) is short. Erm ...

Dave

<Cheech&Chong> - Dave's not here! </Cheech&Chong>