[Foundation-l] This is not an Advertisement

Thu Dec 28 21:50:06 UTC 2006

Op donderdag 28 december 2006 21:42, schreef Brion Vibber:
> JeroenVP for instance has made clear that he does not care about the
> core values of Wikipedia at all (making knowledge available to the
> public as free content) but only cares about not ever seeing anything he
> perceives as an "advertisement".

I assume the above statement is a way to polarise the discussion ever more and 
I will ignore these remarks.

> It's about free/open educational content. It's about making materials
> open and available for use by the public, including the creation of
> derivative works and redistribution.

Exactly, but you you miss the point completely Brion. It's advertisement at a 
location where the free content is CREATED, not redistributed/mirrored. 
Actually I don't care about if people make money with Wikipedia content, the 
same applies for Linux distributions, but we are talking about advertisement 
on the location where the content is created. That kills our reliability, so 
far we have that allready. It's not about business-models, websites, but 
about the source off the free content. Any connection to what kind of 
company, religion, political party, government, whatever... will harm one of 
the basic principles of this great project.

It really sadness me also to hear that you and the Foundation are 
opportunists, that can endanger the projects.

> I do expect some people to leave; that's not because they're bad people.
> But some people are going to discover, sooner or later, that they've
> been chasing something *other* than free content, and that Wikipedia
> isn't really the project for them after all.

Hopefully it will be those people who endanger Wikipedia and such, like 
selling us out and don't have any respect for the community. The community 
who created Wikipedia and such.

> That's why we need to stop, to think.

That's what we do all the time, unfortunately we don't think the same. 

I will ask the Foundation to make an official excuse to the community about 
forcing these site notices and about not directly informing the communities. 
I will also ask to stop any other actions like these in the future, until the 
community at least can have a vote in this matter.

Jeroenvrp