[Foundation-l] aWheeler #00 - by the grace of Wikimedia

Tue Jun 13 20:59:01 UTC 2006

In-Reply-To: <50174.82.45.205.32.1149878975.squirrel at webmail7.pair.com>
on Fri, 9 Jun Alison Wheeler wrote:

>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.
>.............

Alison raises a crucial point here (even if tangent to Anthony's).
So, if WMF attracts rough play by being the legal body responsible
for entries - what can be done to eradicate said responsibility??

Backing up to Anthony's post.  I readily admit that there are plenty of
Internet services which I enthusiastically & respectfully employ without
ever really caring about their foundations.  WP is a whole other animal
however, and it is difficult to see how anyone who's been made aware of
the phenomenon could fail to be extremely interested in all its aspects.
But gawd knows, this is the exact type of thing I can be so wrong about.
Therefore, who has some good ideas on how to estimate what percentage of
Wikipedians are interested in WMF?

Z.Clark