Questions for Friday

Questions for Jimmy, Biella, Evan

(over now!)

Please integrate and rank questions in document mode.

• How do organized harassment campaigns affect our community's ability to function in our mission, and what can we do to combat it?
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• From early days of Wikipedia we have taken advantage of the relative freedoms of publishing, copyright, and libel law hosting the project in the US. If the laws become more hostile, what are the community's options?
• In one of the documents in Wikimedia strategy process it is stated: "The Western encyclopedia model is not serving the evolving needs of all people who want to learn." Now, in your opinion: 1) how far from our current encyclopedia model should we be willing to go? 2) what shall Wikipedia be, if it should one day no more be an encyclopedia? 3) do you think the people in our community who came to write an encyclopedia will still stay with the movement when their initial reason to be here will have disappeared?
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• Right now editing and reading Wikipedia is slow and user controlled: no one is pushing updates at you and you have to stop and hit refresh to reach out and observe changes happening. The trend in interfaces is real-time interactivity and continuous streaming. Is careful deliberation fundamental to our project? How would WP and sister projects' change if the tempo was pushed up?
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• How could we bring back the positivism and progressivism that was dominating the first 20 (?) years of the Web?

• Given Jimmy's statement that the initial policies are vital to how Wikipedia has grown, was it a mistake to leave accessibility out of the Pillars? ("free access for every single person on the planet")
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• Has paid advocacy grown to the point of overwhelming the community by discouraging admin participation? Under what conditions would a spin-off organization, like WikiEd, without the WMF's content editing restrictions, be an appropriate way to counter paid COI editing?
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• We talk a lot about harassment and the problems it brings to the diversity and health of the communities. Civility is one of the five pillars, but seems to be one of the least consistently applied. Why, and how can we encourage and empower communities to improve this aspect of the movement?

• Will projects like WikiData help address the major issues we're seeing with the lack of trust in expertise and experts?

• What is the biggest legislative threat to the free knowledge movement?