[Foundation-l] Mission/Vision Statement

Fri Jan 5 11:05:07 UTC 2007

"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage
people around the world to collect and develop educational content
under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it
effectively and globally."

I note that this sentence does not have any notion of the word
"collaborate" in it.  IMO this notion *is* present in the vision
statement (to "freely share in" implies cooperation, and not just
people working independently), but the mission statement doesn't seem
to capture it.  Sure, people collect, develop, and disseminate free
content, but is that what distinguishes Wikimedia from other
organizations?  Or is it the real-time collaboration that does that?

Erik, in another thread you are discussing whether or not Wikimedia
should get involved with hosting videos, and one concern you have with
it is that "the strength of wiki is to collaborate".  But hosting of
free videos does disseminate free content, it does encourage people to
collect it, and to a lesser extent it even encourages people to
develop it.  Under the current mission statement collaboration isn't
even mentioned.

Anthony

On 1/4/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The currently proposed mission & vision statement of WMF are at:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mission/Unstable&oldid=485535
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vision/Unstable&oldid=470952
>
> I originally intended for us to have a community poll on these
> statements once the open editing phase is complete. However, editing
> and discussion activity on these statements have been minimal in spite
> of repeated announcements. Would there be objections to the Board
> simply ratifying these two statements as they are now?
> --
> Peace & Love,
> Erik
>
> DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of
> the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.
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