[Advocacy Advisors] Which would help volunteer editors more?

Thu Nov 28 20:23:44 UTC 2013

On Nov 28, 2013 10:09 PM, "Amgine" <amgine at wikimedians.ca> wrote:
>
> I do not believe we have meaningful control over either the economic
> or the physiological health of the editor pool.

It has been established by example that the English Wikipedia is able to
influence its readership politically to generate very large scale effective
political change from calls to action. We are also a primary source of
information about health for both physicians and lay people. More directly,
the Foundation now makes decisions about how to compensate editors and
chapters based on the merit of their proposals as submitted, directly.

So, for example, if there were a banner directing people to  fixmyjob.comor
heathcare-now.org, there is no reason to believe it would not generate very
substantial support from readers and have a large actual, and probably
measurable, impact on the extent to which they are truly empowered to
contribute.

Ignoring political realities of the factors that influence the day to day
lives of editors, potential, current, and former, is just that -- willful
ignorance. When the legal team was threatened with the potential
troublesome overhead of removing links due to SOPA/PIPA, the community
supported action to prevent that. When are we going to take action to
support the wider editor community?

Pretending that political and economic factors are somehow out of the scope
of the mission requires imagining that the mission statement says something
about them. It does not. What is the relative impact on a potential editor
who might not be able to include hyperlinks to copyrighted media because of
SOPA versus one who has to work two jobs to make ends meet?

Why is political neutrality on economic issues preferable to political
neutrality on intellectual property law issues? The latter is a subset of
the former. Acting as though one side of economic political debates is not
more accurate than their opposition in the face of overwhelming evidence to
the contrary is tantamount to the worst kind of "he said, she said"
journalism, which in this case is not only an affront to the readers who
expect occasional rational calls to action, but actively harms the rate at
which the encyclopedia is improved.
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