User:Eloquence/Platform
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- This document is part of my candidacy for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. It is intended as a supplement to the brief statements "Concerns I hope to address" and "Vision for the future of the Wikimedia project" on m:Election Candidates. Feel free to edit this page in accordance with my editing policy for comments.
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Why I am doing this
Before I joined Wikipedia, I was an active contributor on Kuro5hin, a technology and culture weblog, where I wrote over 45 articles and hundreds of comments. I learned from Kuro5hin that democratic processes can work to produce high quality content: articles on K5 are democratically voted on and go through an editing phase, which is however much less collaborative than a wiki.
This is also where I first heard about Wikipedia in July 2001, when Larry Sanger wrote his article (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/7/25/103136/121) about Britannica and Nupedia. I became curious, but I was skeptical about the wiki concept at first, like probably all of us were. Nevertheless, I edited on again, off again (often deterred by the heavy slowdowns that followed the transition to the new software), and eventually became convinced that this wiki thing could work. I started my own wiki [1] (http://www.infoanarchy.org/story/2002/8/3/43157/22890) in August 2002.
By now I have done quite a bit on Wikipedia, editing articles but also participating in technology and policy discussions on the mailing lists as well as creating and improving policy documents on the wiki itself, organizing several project-wide votes (most notably the international logo contest), etc.. When I discovered a feature called "double click editing" on another wiki I tried to nag the developers into implementing it, and eventually did it myself. Other improvements like table of contents generation, section editing and the graphical edit toolbar followed, and I also helped with the server administration where possible.
My user page has a list of most of my on-wiki contributions in terms of code, policy and articles. I also run the Wikipedia shop (http://www.cafeshops.com/wikipedia) and I took the initiative [2] (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc/14065) to start the fundraising campaign which brought us $40,000 in donations in a week. Off the wiki, I have also done quite a lot of work related to Wikipedia. I've written the four-part article series "Tanz der Gehirne (http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/14736/1.html)" (German) in May 2003, which examines Wikipedia and compares it with Everything2, H2G2, and traditional encyclopedias; to my knowledge, it is still the most comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia to date. I've talked about Wikipedia at conferences in Vienna, Stuttgart, and Sarajaveo (a video of my lecture in Vienna is available (http://opencultures.t0.or.at/oc/participants/moeller)). I will moderate the "Wikipedia and Friends (http://wiki.wizards-of-os.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_And_Friends)" panel at the Wizards of OS conference in June 2003, where Jimbo Wales will be a speaker. I have written articles about our software, MediaWiki, for c't magazine and Linux Magazine. I run a small MediaWiki hosting service (http://www.myoo.de) which currently hosts SymbolWiki, Memory Alpha, and a few private MediaWiki installations. As such, Wikimedia has already become a part of my professional life.
As one of the MediaWiki coders I know very well the limits of what our software and hardware can and cannot do and will raise early objections against projects which are likely doomed to failure. On the other hand, this technical knowledge also gives me the ability to look ahead and help along important innovations that are crucial to the future growth and health of all of Wikimedia's projects or just some of them.
As a contributor I am no stranger to controversy and the different models of dispute resolution which exist. I do not seek to gloss over problems with the wiki model, such as the fact that being persistent and acting like a bully can often get you what you want. Instead I constantly look for technological and social remedies, such as the Wikipedia:Quickpolls idea which I implemented here on the English Wikipedia that allows for temporary bans on a limited set of policy violations. You may want to take a look at the history of the quickpolls-related pages as an example for how I believe policy discussions should work -- we debated the propsal until an almost unanimous consensus among over 20 contributors was found (which doesn't change the fact that quickpolls have flaws, and need further improvements).
As a longtime Internet user, observer and member of online communities as well as online economies, I believe I have a reasonable understanding of what factors help and hinder our success. I have collected data (http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Gift_Economy_Data) on the working models of online donation campaigns and gift economies, long before people like Howard Dean proved once and for all that online donations do work. I believe I have quite well-developed ideas of what can and cannot be done on the Internet, and that this knowledge can help me in what I consider one important role as a member of the board, to formulate rules for the creation of new Wikimedia projects and help them along.
As a moderately active contributor to a non-English Wikipedia, I have first hand knowledge of the mood in what is sometimes jokingly called one of the "colonies" and am very much interested in making sure that we do not give any of our non-English projects an incentive to split away, and that we instead nurture and feed them and that we indeed view ourselves as one community, indivisible by ideology, language or nation, sharing the common goal of contributing to the enlightenment of humanity.
I believe that our hopes for what Wikimedia can and should be will only be realized with a full understanding of the technological, political, economic, and social components of our project. Do I have this full understanding? Of course not, as such an understanding can only be a shared, collective understanding. To quote Douglas Engelbart:
- "If we don't improve our ability to deal collectively with complex things, as the problems grow more urgent, we're in trouble."
This is, of course, also true for Wikipedia itself. The role of the board cannot be to dictate, it needs to listen, but it should also be able to act quickly if necessary, and it should take a guiding role in the progress of Wikimedia based on a solid understanding of the state and health of the community.
There are, without doubt, many members of our community who excel in one of the areas I mentioned: technical knowledge, social competence, political skills, economic wisdom. However, I believe that a member of the board should not necessarily excel in any particular area, but that they must also not disappoint in any of them. I see these qualities in myself. I do not excel in any area -- unlike some of the other candidates --, but I do believe I have a solid basic understanding in all of them.
Like all human beings, I have flaws. I am sensitive to personal attacks. I can be overzealous in defending what I believe to be truthful. I am eager to get things done, and may push things a little too fast on occasion. And of course I have a life besides Wikipedia which sometimes takes more, sometimes less of my time, and since this is an unpaid volunteer role, I can only do so much of the things I would like to do.
But nobody can dispute my commitment to the success of this project and my passion for it. I take this candidature quite seriously, and regardless of whether or not I will eventually join the Board, I will use whatever influence I have to promote the following goals.
My goals
Quality control and print editions
- "The day will come when I will put out the call for funds to distribute paper copies of Wikipedia to every child in every third world country in the world." – Jimbo Wales
I fully share Jimmy's vision of getting Wikimedia into print (and DVD, for that matter). This may in fact be even more important for Wikibooks (http://www.wikibooks.org/), which can have much more practical value in poor nations. Wherever there is a sufficient level of literacy, people should have easy access to our content, with or without the Internet. Where that level of literacy does not exist, we can seek to promote it, although other organizations will perhaps be better suited for that. Getting into print will indeed require massive funds, which I believe we can unlock (see #Effective fundraising).
Education is the foundation of democracy and civil rights. Therefore, we can play a very important role in promoting both. However, this requires that our content is actually accurate and credible. We like to tell ourselves that the wiki process leads to accurate information, but we all know that there are many exceptions to that rule, especially when an article is so contentious that new claims are being added every day, or so obscure that only one person has ever edited it.
I firmly believe that establishing working, fun quality control mechanisms will be our greatest undertaking ever since the creation of Wikipedia itself.
I emphasize the word fun because that is, after all, the reason you and I started working on these wikis – the instant gratification of editing, the feedback from other editors, the satisfaction of looking at a page that developed from a stub into a well-illustrated treatise, the amazing usefulness of diffs, recent changes, watchlists, and so forth.
People work on Wikipedia as long as it is fun and they cease doing so when it stops being fun. It stops being fun when the site is dominated by trolls and bullies, made overly complex (see #Usability) or becomes too much of a clique or oligarchy (see #Democracy and openness). Peer review processes, if not properly implemented, can harm usability. But mostly, they will just be ignored, which would be very unfortunate.
So we need to find ways to make reviewing articles as much fun as creating them. Peer review includes:
- checking the copyright status of an article
- verifying whether all the facts are correct
- checking the spelling and compliance with stylistic guidelines
- looking for violations of our neutrality policy
- determining if the article is as comprehensive as it should be, includes enough illustrations, etc.
I believe a working peer review process must be multi-staged. It is not enough to simply ask people, as we do on Wikipedia:Featured article candidates, whether they like an article, especially as this particular process is heavily biased in favor of promoting articles (most people don't want to stand in the way of a promotion too long). My experience on FAC indicates that many people have not even read the articles they support (no surprise, many of them are 40,000 characters and longer). Still, even with this simple process, we only have about 100 articles which haved pass this type of review.
We have two conflicting goals here. Peer review needs to be rigorous, which tends to make it tedious, but it also needs to be rewarding, which might drive people to push pages through it to get the feeling of reward associated with it. Having a multi-staged process does address this to some extent, but not fully. Offering additional incentives for finding and fixing problems in any of the named problem areas may help. On a technological level, peer review must be very, very fluid – ready-made page templates should be provided for peer review pages, and adding information about any of the above categories of review should only take seconds. Yet we must not forget that we are a wiki, and the first thing people should do when they see a mistake is fix it. So peer review should be directly linked with the editing process.
I believe that the Wikimedia Foundation must take a steering role in developing peer review processes for all Wikimedia projects which satisfy these criteria, with enough freedom given to allow for competing implementations. Some projects may prefer elected editors to a fully open consensus-based process, some may want qualified experts while others will accept anyone who claims to know what they are talking about. We should experiment with these solutions and eventually promote the most effective one.
I believe that we need ways to distinguish "stable" revisions of articles and "unstable", current ones. An article which has undergone peer review will not be frozen, but the peer reviewed version will be flagged, and users can browse in such a way that they will never encounter any non-reviewed articles, without moving to a separate site or losing the ability to edit. This takes away our crtics' strongest argument, that it is impossible to trust a wiki. "No," we will be able to say, "you have a choice – get a limited set of potentially outdated, but accurate and systematically reviewed articles, or get the full set of pages which may or may not be accurate (think for yourself!)."
We should set optimistic, but realistic goals – let's say 10,000 peer reviewed articles on Wikipedia in the first year of the process being used. And we should move away from "the nth article" press releases, at least for the very large projects. If we can say in 4 or 5 years that we have 100,000 peer reviewed English or German articles, that will be as gigantic an accomplishment as the creation of the articles themselves.
Let's not forget that Nupedia failed because of its very complicated and bureaucratic peer review system. Ours must be much more fun, much more rewarding, a new and exciting challenge for all of us.
In the end, people should say "I don't trust government textbooks - Wikibooks are so much more accurate." Or: "The Britannica article about circumcision is completely biased and very outdated. Wikipedia's is much better." We need to earn people's trust by working hard to check every fact, to create truly brilliant works like mankind has not seen them before, because they were written not by tens, but by thousands of people working together on a common goal.
Political influence
Wikimedia does not exist in a political vacuum. I am convinced that we need to use our influence as a highly respected and loved organization to call for legal changes that are useful to us and to prevent those which are harmful. We would benefit a lot from lower copyright terms, for example. The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended copyright in the United States (the Foundation is subject to US law) to "life of the author plus 70 years" for individual works. That means that if I died tomorrow, anything I wrote without explicitly putting it in the public domain would only fall into it by 2074. It has been demonstrated by economists that for 99% of works, this is completely nonsensical even if one wants to maximize profits, as there is no economic interest in exploiting them for such an amount of time. Copyright is extended primarily to satisfy the specific interests of corporations like Disney, which fear that their characters will fall into the public domain.
At the very least, we should support legal proposals such as the Eric Eldred Act (http://eldred.cc/), but I would also love to see broader initiatives in this area. Every single year of reduced copyright terms means that a thousand more works which are no longer economically viable but of historical interest become available to us - texts and images of all types. This is of course very useful to the mission of Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, and Wikisource. Even Wikiquote would benefit from the additional pictures which they could use.
Another area of concern are software patents, which threaten the very foundation of our project, the underlying MediaWiki open source software. Wikimedia may not want to adopt a categorical anti-patent position, but we should strongly oppose the granting of trivial patents, document prior art, and be ready and willing to fight lawsuits to defend our innovations when necessary.
This is also true for overbroad interpretations of copyright or trademark law. When a corporation like Corbis threatens us with a lawsuit for hosting an image that is clearly in the public domain (but they claim to have "reproduction rights" because it was digitized by them), we will have to decide whether we want to fight a precedent lawsuit. From a public relations point of view, such a lawsuit should be fought about an absolutely unambiguous case, where it is clear who the "pirates" are -- the corporation trying to steal from the public domain. As for trademarks, this primarily applies to things like logos, where we can likely claim fair use. Nevertheless, we should register and protect our own trademarks, as that is our primary line of defense against plagiarism.
Wikimedia also has a logical interest to fight censorship, at least in forms which do not allow it to operate freely. We should strive to provide read access to our content to people living in repressive nations, whether that content is distributed over the Internet, on CDs and DVDs or in print.
We need to keep a watchful eye on the continuing changes to the "intellectual property" framework and the ways in which they may affect us. This does not only include legal changes, but also operational changes within institutions such as patent offices, and important precedents in the courts. We should comment on important issues in Wikimedia press releases, and we should employ all legal mechanisms of lobbyism to bring about changes to our advantage.
Effective fundraising
Howard Dean raised and burned 40 million dollars over the Internet in just a few months. Hopefully our burn-rate will be lower than that, but we should employ the fundraising mechanisms which he used regularly. This includes things like real-time (!) graphical updates and fundraising-related discussions. Also, there should be an opt-in checkbox when making a donation which allows one to have their name listed, and there should be stastics which show the largest donors - by name or anonymized - as well as the most recent ones.
I am largely opposed to subscription mechanisms because I believe that the funds we raise should not primarily come from editors but from readers, for obvious reasons. The slightest hint or suggestion that people have to pay for making contributions to the wikis must be avoided. Fundraisers should always be prominently announced to the outside world and not just be an internal affair. It may make sense to use a blog-style format for the fundraising page, where regular updates are posted on various wiki-related issues, as an incentive for people to visit it regularly (and make more donations).
Merchandising efforts, such as the Wikipedia shop (http://www.cafepress.com/wikipedia) which I run for the foundation, should be increased. If people want Jimbo Wales bobbleheads, we will give them Jimbo Wales bobbleheads. The print and DVD versions, where they are not given away for free, will of course also be sold, and each Wikimedia project should have T-Shirts, logos, mousepads and so forth with its logo on them.
While grass-roots fundraising is powerful, it would be foolish not to try to access other sources of funding. Because of the international nature of our project, we can and should get in touch with pretty much any charity that promotes intellectual progress and education, including purely regional ones such as some of George Soros' "Open Society" funds. The European Union may also be interested in specifically promoting the European editions of Wikimedia projects. Lastly, there may be wealthy individuals whom we can persuade to support our project directly.
In order to effectively raise funds locally, Wikimedia needs daughter organizations in pretty much every country with an existing Wikimedia community; if possible, these should be recognized as charitable organizations to allow for tax-deductible donations.
Bounties and rewards
One of our primary uses for funds will always be the expansion of our ever growing server farm. Aside from hardware, raised funds could be used for the establishment of a Wikimedia bounty system. The first experiment in this area which I will promote is the use of bounties for software development. For example, a bounty of $200 could be posted for the implementation of a m:single login across all Wikimedia projects (a fairly large and undeniably useful undertaking). Bounties would be organized on a wiki page, where users would be able to vote on the priorities, or even to say that they will implement a certain task for free, so that the bounty should be used for something else. Tasks need to be precisely defined, so that their completion or lack thereof can be judged by the community.
If this scheme is successful and does not discuourage people from working on the code without getting paid for it, a similar one could be tried for content, such as posting bounties for expert peer review, or for adding well-researched facts to underdeveloped articles. Again, the process for choosing how the bounties should be used must be democratic. Bounties should come from a specially designated set of funds which have been explicitly donated for that purpose, of from money which has been acquired by other means (such as prize money).
Competitions with prizes like merchandising items and other "cool stuff" should be considered for logos, banners and similar talent contents. If we can afford it, I would even consider ideas like "Wikimedia Scholarships" for excellent contributors (but of course there would be a competition among the users, and possibly an election, for such a reward, and the criteria for eligibility might be quite narrow).
All these incentives must be provided fairly, and there must never be the impression of different classes of membership. As such, this is an area where we should move very carefully, step by step, and stop and reconsider immediately if we run into problems.
Democracy and openness
With over 50 languages and people from all Internet-connected countries (which cover the full range of modern government types), maintaining democratic organization principles, and indeed maintaining a coherent organization will prove to be a monumental undertaking. There are very few organizations which operate in so many nations, since as noted above, we will require local organizations wherever there is a substantial Wikimedia community.
This can only be accomplished with a combination of what one might call a constitution (a shared set of beliefs and policies) and grass-roots organization. Aside from policy freedoms, we must allow local daughter organization certain legal freedoms that go beyond them -- e.g. they may legally be allowed to change their constitution to something different -- so as to not stifle their creation; however, we can use our trademark rights to prevent an organization from calling itself Wikimedia if it does not represent our interests and constitution.
Daughter organizations should have the rights to use funds for themselves as long as their operations are made fully transparent and in compliance with certain basic rules (for example, we may want to limit the types and range of political activity). There should of course be no discrimination against any individual organization.
I believe that openness is absolutely crucial in everything we do. We should hold ourselves to high standards of reporting -- be it the use of donated funds, the setup of new projects, the negotiation of deals, the declaration of certain rules, and so forth. Essentially everything the Wikimedia Foundation does in any capacity whatsoever should be reported within a defined timeframe (e.g. 3 months), and members should have the opportunity to object beforehand whenever this is reasonably possible.
Technological openness should be maintained. In fact, I believe that in some areas we can become even more open. For example, one technical innovation I would like to see implemented is MeatBall:FileReplacement, which could allow us to get rid of page protection almost entirely. On the other hand, I do not see the wiki principles as inviolable dogma. If a project requires different membership rules, for example, that should not be out of the question simply because it is "un-wiki." And if some of these principles were clearly and undeniably refuted at some point and replaced by something better, we should embrace that innovation (e.g. a better security model).
While I believe in openness and am a strong enemy of government censorship in all forms, I also think that members who are deliberately trying to disturb and harm our projects and who clearly violate our policy need to be swiftly dealt with. I have no sympathy for trolls whatsoever. I fully support effective anti-troll measures, although we should always try reform before we resort to punishment. I am not categorically opposed to astroturfing, but it should be exposed when provably occurring, so as to detect future instances by the same user.
Policies for how to deal with these issues are not for the Board to decide, but the Foundation also has a responsibility toward its members to make sure that all projects are running smoothly, and should instigate discussions and reforms when there is evidence to the contrary.
Neutrality and fairness
NPOV is one of the cornerstones of Wikipedia, and it should be non-negotiable for all Wikipedia editions. For each new Wikimedia project, there should be a policy on how to deal with different points of view, and in most cases, NPOV will be the policy that we want to use.
I have long planned a complete rewrite of the NPOV policy page because I consider it difficult to understand. I also believe that some aspects need to be improved, particularly the ways in which we deal with criticisms (should they get separate articles? I believe not) and with religious themes (when should space be given to non-religious perspectives, and how much?). Such a reform should be followed by a vote, and eventually, it may be a good idea to make the reformed, clarified NPOV policy a part of our aforementioned constititution, and to maintain it not in different variants, but in a single, translated text.
Being neutral also means not disparaging other points of view, not needlessly removing text, and so forth. This fairness to me is an essential component of the NPOV policy. We should not pander to any viewpoint, but we also do not pronounce verdicts.
The nature of NPOV is that articles will amost never concisely present the truth, especially in matters such as history, religion or morality. Because of that, I would not be completely opposed to having spin-off wikis for original research, or for determining the truth through logical argument. Such a wiki or wikis might also be a good place to send ideologues to.
Usability
In the department of technological development, usability is one of my most important concerns. We must avoid cluttering the wiki software with features which will confuse newbies. I believe in the following principle:
- Power features for power users.
What I mean by that is that things like infoboxes may very well include complex HTML layouts, as long as these layouts are only visible to the people who care about editing them. The template system currently under development allows parameters, so that, for example {{Country|Name=Germany|Flag=Image:Flag-Germany.png}} becomes a country infobox with these parameters, loaded from Template:Country. I can well imagine future expansions to this scheme such as
- storing metadata like the above Name=, Flag= in a table to make it searchable
- allowing simple programming constructs in the Template: namespace (loops, conditions)
- allowing a wide range of external plug-ins for things like graphs, chessboards, music, etc.
Again, if these enhancements are only visible to users who care about them, while normal editors just see very simple text with a few "magic" constructs that do amazing things, that's very much in our interest. On the other hand, cluttering our syntax with more and more tags and constructs which then show up within the article source of thousands of pages is not desirable. Similarly, the standard user interface should be free of clutter which the average user doesn't care about.
I would be very much in favor of conducting systematic usability studies to determine which aspects of MediaWiki are particularly confusing to newbies and need to be improved -- be it the editing syntax or the user interface.
Wikimedia is not just Wikipedia
Because Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia it is easy to overlook our other projects. This would be a huge mistake, because some of them have tremendous potential. To me, this is especially true for Wikibooks and Wikisource. Wikibooks is the "practical" alternative to Wikipedia, the web site that people should go to when they want to figure out how to do something. Wikisource could grow into not just a source repository, but also a place to add annotations and commentary, as well as to collaboratively create translations. Imagine that people might donate their texts under a free license just to get them translated by our volunteers! With good planning and promotion, these two projects can and will become very important.
Wiktionary suffers from the fact that the software is still very page-centric, rather than data-centric, which makes it difficult to do things like quickly getting a translation from A to B. We should promote necessary changes to the software to allow such advanced, targeted data searches.
Each and every single Wikimedia project deserves our attention. And we must also have the honesty to admit when a project has clearly failed, and get rid of it or transform it into something else (the only project which I can think of that in my opinion already is a failure is the September 11 wiki (http://sep11.wikipedia.org/)).
New projects
I am thrilled by the fact that we do not limit ourselves to one project, and will always be keenly interested in every single project proposal. However, I would like to expound here on two project ideas in particular.
The first is the m:Wikimedia Commons proposal, which I want to see implemented as soon as possible. It is essentially the idea to build a shared media repository for all wikis, which can be transparently accessed (which means that you don't have to care whether [[Image:House.jpg]] is on the local wiki, or in the shared repository, it will be found and displayed in both cases).
This would reduce redundancy across wikis and contribute to a more coherent community feeling of being part of the same project. But I also believe that the Commons idea is an interesting project of its own, in that it would be a central place for people to donate free and open content without having to think about how to use it -- the Commons community would examine its usefulness for them. This would allow us to get in touch with thousands of amateur photographs, artists etc. whose material might be of interest to us, and who can then easily add it to our shared archive. Furthermore, I think this project would help a lot in establishing the Wikimedia brand identity, which is currently largely unknown.
Attached to the Wikimedia Commons proposal is the single sign-on idea, which is one of the most often requested changes to the MediaWiki software, but non-trivial because of the thousands of existing accounts. The Commons is our best chance to implement single sign-on, an important feature for bringing Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikipedia etc. cloer together, so that people can easily switch from one to the other. This is one of the projects which I would strongly consider putting a bounty on, as it's simply such a large and unrewarding job.
Another project idea near and dear to my heart is m:Wikinews, even though the page on Meta does not reflect my current state of thinking, which I have so far not written down. I believe that the same principles which have been applied to create an encyclopedia, free textbooks, and so on can be applied to compete with every TV and radio station, every newspaper in the world -- to become an independent, neutral news website, like Wikipedia is an independent, neutral encyclopedia.
There is, however, one important difference. On Wikipedia we do not allow original research, and that gives us an easy way to deal with cranks and crackpots -- if they can't prove that someone else has made their claims, then the claims aren't relevant to the article (unless they themselves are important researches and have published them). Wikinews, if it doesn't just want to be the open content equivalent of http://news.google.com (i.e. a news summary service), has to do original reporting. But how do we distinguish between true and false reports? I believe here we cannot allow any anonymous user to make any claim, there needs to be an identity, a reputation, attached to it. On the other hand, anonymous users would very much be allowed to add attributed quotes, correct spelling mistakes and the like.
There is an expectation of immediate accuracy from news stories, which means that articles would have to undergo a peer review process before they are "officially" published. I believe simply putting an "Article in progress" tag on pages which have not yet been reviewed, and making them editable only to sysops after they have been published, would be a good way to deal with this problem.
Finally, orignal reporting takes time and money, and this is again an area where bounties or direct payments might make sense. Taken together, these may seem like large changes to the Wikipedia model, but this is a large task, and as I noted above, I do not believe that sticking to any kind of dogma will bring us forward.
The democratic potential of truly free, international news media cannot be overestimated. Aside from open content and massive collaboration, there is one key difference between this project and something like Indymedia: We would be able to maintain a neutral point of view. Indymedia is essentially an advocacy news site, while this project would be as unbiased as possible.
Content partnerships
A few months ago, I convinced Jimbo to give me the nice, official-sounding title of "content partnership coordinator". I have used this title to try to get in touch with IMDB, Amazon.com, and others who might be interested in our content. I see this as a key role for the Foundation itself, as corporations like to talk to "official" persons rather than just seemingly random community members.
I believe content partnerships with such companies can be very useful to us: Imagine that when searching for a book on Amazon.com, one of the first thing you see is the Wikipedia summary for that book (if it exists). The only requirement from our part would be a backlink to the Wikipedia article. Thus, thousands of people would click through directly to the page, and if only 1% of them edit the article, and only half of these edits are improvements, we have already won a lot.
Another type of content partnership are copyleft partnerships. The Wikipedia license requires that all improvements are also open content (aside from fair use or equivalent changes and distribution which it does not affect). So if we get a magazine to use an article we created, and they add a pretty picture, we can plausibly argue that we have a right to use that picture as well. Therefore, seeking out potential users who make improvements to our content is very beneficial to us.
Of course, we must plausibly enforce our license in order to be credible in negotiations, and also as a responsibility to our contributors, who expect to be given fair credit for their work. This is an area where the community can and does try to help, but the Foundation should become active quickly when community action has bene fruitless. I have, in a couple of instances, managed to get sites to comply with our license, and using the title of content partnership coordinator has also helped here. But aside from titles, the demonstrated willingness to use legal means is very important. Nevertheless, we should always assume good faith until bad faith has been proven beyond reasonable doubt.