> On 01 December 2018 at 09:30 Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequ...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > More radically, you could move the UK wiki to be a project on Meta. > >
<snip> > I can’t think of anything we have ever gained from having our own > independent Wiki as opposed to a project on Meta, unless you count > independence and seperation from the rest of the movement as a positive. > As a matter of history, independence was a big motivation, rightly or wrongly. There is fundraising to consider, naturally. There is more than that one wiki hosted, even in terms of MediaWiki instances. In terms of fundraising, I spoke in 2010 (as WMUK staff) to someone then working in online fundraising as CE of a charity. Who told me that Wikimedia as a whole undershot what could be done in terms of raising funds, by an order of magnitude; and that you had to cater for the needs of the savvy donor, who researches charities online. The point is obviously not to rely entirely on impulse giving. Now, that cannot be done on meta, clearly. Does there need to be a wiki involved? There an element here of business logic versus open logic. Certainly one argument is "a report on the charity's activities is under professional control, and that is what should be online". A counter-argument is that it would convey nothing distinctive, everyone knows that glossiness can be purchased, and the WMF set its face some time ago against the plusher models of charity and NGO development. A colleague told me not long ago that the trend for corporate sites is to make them leaner. The rationale is that people will anyway use other sources of information about corporation C, researching it elsewhere. Part of this discussion should be whether that would actually be a good thing for chapter's comms. There is a familiar debate here about who are the stakeholders and so on, and honestly anyone who brings up rationalising the wiki out of existence really needs to have their own version of that to hand. Actually the UK wiki seems to me to have suffered from a couple of things. These really shouldn't have to be spelled out. They are: (a) That it has been treated as an appendage to the office system; and (b) A division of labour that is familiar from WP, that everyone should muck in on the scutwork, some people develop substantive content, and others do maintenance work like tagging with templates and effectively archiving old content, has not been understood by the office. And that none of this should be confused with the developer time cost, though there is certainly a cost to not having the site run like a dog and suffering periods of downtime. For heaven's sake, a way to engage volunteers familiar with wiki editing is to have a wiki they'd want to edit. Not some sort of obsolescent filing cabinet. In these terms, beware the stakeholder analysis that simply ignores the group of people who, wait for it, actually write Wikipedia. Charles
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