[Foundation-l] and what if...

Sun Dec 14 00:19:32 UTC 2008

2008/12/13 Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
> My answer tomorrow could be
> "Wikipedia was probably the least planned project ever; it currently has
> reached the level of a non-profit start-up, with a planning ability of
> about 1 year".

Scenario planning longer than that would start making some seriously
unwarranted assumptions. For example it would be somewhat dicey to bet
against the position that in 5 years time most content added to
wikipedia will be bot extracted from google books (I've already seen
claims that bots can write articles with something like 90% accuracy
from just standard websites given who was making them they may have a
point).

In such an environment long term planning is of questionable value.

To concentrate on the censorship issue any scenario would normally
assume that the internet infrastructure will remain constant. Safe
over one year less so for more than that.

> and
> "Professionals could probably help us grow up in certain areas, but they
> would have to cope with all the no-life standing on our mailing lists".

You missed that wikipedians are paranoid and thus unlikely to want to
discuss negative scenarios due to the risk people might actually try
to cause them to hurt wikipedia

In any case the mailing list is not a good place to carry out such
planning which is better done on wiki where a kinda finished result
can be organized.

Finally we would have to get some honest answers from the foundation
about where it plans to be in 5 years time (funding, server location,
size, legal position).
-- 
geni