[Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia meeting today

Sat Aug 27 19:03:09 UTC 2005

Dan Grey wrote:
> On 27/08/05, Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>>Well, it has been staying on the agenda for a lonnnnng time. And
>>discussed many times on the mailing list (wikinews), with some editors
>>contacting us so that the issue be fixed. Hence it being listed.
> 
> 
> Yes, the license has been discussed on and off for the entire lifetime
> of the project, usually just the same arguments being rehashed over
> and over. I've also noticed that fewer and fewer people are involved
> in each round, probably because rarely anything ever comes of the
> discussions.
> 
> There's a slight difference about us discussing amongst ourselves and
> the board talking about it though. The latter *might* result in some
> sort of action being taken, so in this instance the participation of
> the people who actually create what will be licensed might be a good
> idea.

This is the reason why this meeting is open to everyone.
I tend to think the idea is not even to make the decision of which 
license to choose during the meeting, because I see no reason why a 
selection of people would make such a decision over all editors. But 
rather to find a solution to make it so that such a decision is finally 
taken.

Recently, on the french wikinews, someone even try to change the charter 
to indicate that all content on wikinews was public domain and its 
content forbidden to use for commercial reasons (?!?)

I think it is HIGH time that things are settled down.

>>If you feel it would be a very very very bad idea to discuss it today as
>>you would prefer that wikinewsies be warned sooner, please say it so. I
>>guess we can find enough topics of discussion to fill up 2 hours. Open
>>also means people should feel free to report a major issue to be discussed.
> 
> 
> Discuss it by all means - just please don't make any decisions.
> Something along the lines of "if the community comes to a decision,
> we'll ratify it" might be good :-).
> 
> 
>>I spent two hours this morning trying to clarify many pages on meta.
>>
>>Please see the starting page
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation. I would love that
>>this page is completed little  by little to give a good overview of the
>>Foundation in less than 32 ko.
>>
>>Could anyone help making the paragraphs about "where do we spent money"
>>and "how do we get money" give a good overview to any visitors, plus
>>links for deeper investigation ?
>>
>>
>>Several pages have also been clarified. Such as the official positions
>>and organigram ones.
>>
>>
>>I would also invite editors to comment on a draft of a role, the press
>>officer one, which is currently in french (I'll try to translate it
>>soon). I wrote it thinking of the french association press contact, but
>>I think it could enhance the description of Elian's role quite a bit.
>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Press_Officer
> 
> 
> This is great, I'm glad people haven't given up on this :-)

Do I look like someone giving up on such things ? :-)

. Although,
> as Elian said, it would best if most of this was on the WMF wiki, not
> meta.

I disagree. It is not best that this is on WMF simply because very few 
people edit WMF. When this page has reach a good state, it could be 
copied over there. But right now, we are very far from it. It has more 
chance to become a good page on meta, because they are more editors 
likely to work on it. So let's not try to hurry and do something of poor 
quality. WMF site will wait till the page is good. If we transfer 
entirely the page over there, it will never be good.

Two places covering the same stuff isn't great - they often
> start saying slightly different things over time, and then that raises
> the question of which is authoritative. There's only a few bits that
> need to be editable by just anyone, and therefore remain on meta.
> 
> 
> Dan