[Foundation-l] Would you consider being on the Board?

Fri Jun 9 18:49:35 UTC 2006

On Fri, June 9, 2006 17:57, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> The thing is, the vast majority of those tens of thousands of
> participants don't really care about the foundation.  They just want
> to work on a free encyclopedia/free news reporting service/free image
> repository/whatever.
> It'd be interesting if nothing else to see just what percentage of
> Wikipedians have any desire at all of being Wikimedians.

except that the real thing is, you can't separate the two. Wikipedia (and
Wikibooks, Wiktionary, etc) all exist not by the grace of god, but by the
grace of Wikimedia (Foundation). If someone wants to play rough with a
Wikipedia entry they don't go after the individual editors and try and
trace all the IP addresses, but look to the legal body responsible for
that entry, WMF. As such, whether they are aware they "care about the
foundation" or not, we need to educate them better that they need to.

It's a bit like people who don't vote as they say it isn't relevant to
them. WMF is relevant to *every* editor and reader of every project.

Alison Wheeler