[Foundation-l] Re: Swedish, Spanish, French Wikinews set up

Tue Feb 1 06:59:02 UTC 2005

Erik Moeller a écrit:

>> And you are not in a position to go against the will of any wiki user
>> community.  
>>
> That is your opinion. In my opinion, it is the will of the Wikimedia 
> community as a whole which counts. Wikimedia is a global project. It's 
> not up to the French Wikimedia community to decide by majority that they 
> don't want Wikinews, unless they have France-specific reasons for not 
> wanting it. And I am supported in this both by policy and by statements 
> of the Board to this effect, when I asked them this very question two 
> months ago. Yes, I asked the Board whether we should treat the French 
> Wikinews differently from the others because of the way the vote went, 
> and the answer was no - I can document this with IRC chatlogs if 
> necessary. This, by the way, is an interesting test case for language 
> autonomy. And I firmly support the principle that Wikimedia-wide 
> decisions can overrule local ones.

I am perplex of how you could document that. I remember well that I 
agreed the creation of the new project would ultimately results in 
possibly this project be created in all languages, and that the founding 
principles would be the same in all languages. So, that obviously, all 
languages would be treated the same in that perspective.
This is what I meant by "treated the same", of course, we need a project 
to be consistant across all languages.

But here is also what I remembered we agreed upon (though obviously, 
there was misunderstanding)

* a test site would be created in english

* after a certain time, the test site would go live and become a real 
wikimedia site. At this point, we considered the concept validated by 
the board

* each new site (new language) could start when enough people agree on 
its creation (Obviously, we do not agree on "enough people"; I would 
consider that when there is strong opposition from a community, among 
other things due to legal fears, then enough people is not really one or 
two)

* as long as real editors are below 5 and no sysop is on project, the 
site would be demo for this language in any cases

* only when the board approves would the language specific site becomes 
officially part of wikimedia.

This was what *I* understood and approved.
The reason of the last step was related to legal threats and such.

In all cases, I support that wikimedia-wide policies overrules local 
ones only when it threatens consistency, image and functionning across 
all projects.

As far as I remember, Wikimedia DOES NOT decide what the projects should 
become and wha they should contain. This is up to communities, with the 
benevolent support of the Foundation.

Anthere