Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-06-28/News and notes

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I must say this comment by Sue Gardner was not quite what I expected to read:

"Based on the plan, Sue Gardner projected the Wikimedia Foundation's staff to grow to as many as 200 full-time equivalents by 2015, with annual spending reaching $40 million"

My view is that the basis of contributions to Wikipedia and other projects come from volunteers, and that the staff on Wikimedia Foundation, some 35 persons, are there to maintain servers, fund-raising for servers, legal stuff and some more. Expanding the staff by a factor of almost 10 in five years seems to change the nature of how we work in a way I don't like, seems like the law of the ever expanding bureaucracy. I don't think I will give money for such an expansion and I think it will be a hard sell. We built this with volunteers, no need to change course dramatically now. Ulflarsen (talk) 11:10, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

I am hoping that funding goes to hiring University Outreach and WP:GLAM coordinators, that is where we need to get support for Wikimedia and Wikipedia to gain more reputation in the scholarly community. Sadads (talk) 16:30, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Note that the article describes only the state of 2010-15strategy plan as it was made quasi-official back in April. As indicated in the article, the contents of the plan are still in flux and the final official version will come out in the fall. The current numbers given on the strategy wiki (strategy:Strategic Plan/Role of the WMF - page seems to have been authored largely by the Bridgespan consultants) are 188 employees by 2015, with a $51M budget in 2014-15.

There is an interesting discussion on what this expansion would mean on phoebe's blog, with several board and staff members (current and former, e.g. Brion) weighing in.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:50, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

Regardless, increasing Foundation headcount from 35 to 188 is very much a surprise to those of us who've been around for a while & helped to take Wikipedia from obscurity to one of the top ten websites in terms of page views when there were less than a dozen Foundation staffers. And I believe the problem lies in, to use Ulflarsen's words, the "and some more" area. Beyond IT support, legal support, community outreach & coordination, fund-raising, & the inevitable office administrators, I can't think of any need for more Foundation personnel -- & substantial parts of those areas are handled by volunteers as it is. Now if some of the money were to find its way to those of us who contribute the actual content that people read, now that would be a different discussion. -- llywrch (talk) 19:26, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

I read through what seems to be the main strategy documents and there are a lot of good stuff there, recommended reading. We have challenges in reaching out, gender and nationality of readers and contributors is very unevenly distributed, and some of the underlying problems (difficult to contribute, partnerships with large organisations, like states, companies etc + better infrastructure; servers and such) can only be fixed by WM Foundation.

But, in one of the documents there is this statement which somehow seems to be a vital part of the foundation for the resulting proposal of drastically expanding the staff of the WMF:

"How will we achieve this vision? We believe there is a virtuous circle between between a growing participation in our movement and the quality and reach of our content. These three elements are inextricably tied. Without a healthy and diverse community of participants, the quality of our content will suffer. Without high-quality, multilingual content, we will not be able to reach broader audiences. We believe that investing in any one of these elements will have a positive effect on the others. Or, put another way, reach drives participation, which drives quality, which in turn drives reach."

Even though it states that the three "are inextricably tied", focus seems to be on reach, and to build reach, we need to build up WMF. I may have got this wrong, but all the same volunteers started to participate long before there were reach. When I got into this in June 2004 the English language Wikipedia was some 250K articles, while the Norwegian was about 5K - still I contributed, because I saw the need - and of course because it's fun, and I could.

A $50M budget and 180 staff is in one way really not that much, one could argue that just with what we contribute in the Nordic countries that money should be handed out from our state coffers, Wikipedia is what the pupils/students, journalists etc use. But the thing is the volunteers. We got were we are today with a massive amount of volunteers, this and our non-commercial goal of spreading knowledge set us apart from the other big five (Google, Facebook, Yahoo & Microsoft). I am not against some more staff at WMF, but I think volunteers are essential, and that we should be able to recruit ten times as many as we have today, given two factors: Purpose & easier editing. If you are a professional and your respected community leader - who ever it is, says Wikipedia is good & needed, then you have purpose, and if you don't get turned off by trying to edit, then I think we can achieve a lot. So - Why & How. Ulflarsen (talk) 15:42, 2 July 2010 (UTC)