[Foundation-l] Request for approval for a wiki for standards

Sat Jan 7 18:03:55 UTC 2006

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The
> request was voiced at a conference of language standards in  Berlin (Dec
> 12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards
> community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively
> support this effort. See:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards 

I can't say that I would oppose this as a separate project.  Clearly the 
need to have relatively firm and uneditable versions is much stronger 
than in any of our existing projects.  Other discussions have already 
pointed to the need for versions of Wikipedia articles that are marked 
reliable.

> The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to
> formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be
> written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known
> and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated
> their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for
> other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would
> get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate
> Wiktionary"). 

The drift of Wiktionary2 into this kind of thing seems somehow less 
threatening to the future of the existing Wiktionaries which would 
continue to be real wikis.

Involving oursekves in standards cretion has a deliciously subversive 
ring to it.  If standards can be established through some kind of broad 
global collaboration it's one less thing for governmens to be doing.  As 
I've stated before after the negative votes from France and Holland a 
wiki would be an excellent vehicle for rewriting the EU Constitution. 
... perhaps even a world constitution.

> Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not
> fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original
> works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal
> dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other
> standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make
> use of content in our other projects. 

Fair enough.

> One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia
> Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the
> business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in
> managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies
> between the standards community and the Wikimedia community. 

I'm sure there are vested interests that will object strongly to having 
their gravy trains derailed.

> On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to
> learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense.
> But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to
> standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will
> make increased use of them in our projects. 

Not necessarily.

> On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is
> singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project,
> supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL
> languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have
> discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for
> localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In
> the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to
> integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation
> (CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and
> other meta data. 

Although these standards may already be established, putting them into 
Wikistandards would open them to discussion, and possibly amendment.  
Absolutely nothing should be considered sacred, but that should not 
imply that any existing standard should be immediately thrown into 
chaos.  When it comes to its own internal policies Wikipedia is a model 
of chaos.  It often seems that the process is dominated by a few who 
have an interest in promulgating a particular policy then protecting it 
once that is accomplished.  The entire decision-making process needs to 
be reviewed.

> In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard
> of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects
> must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do
> not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure
> that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard
> process? 

I suppose that a conceivable extension of Jimbo's Frankfurt speech would 
be, "Free the standards."

Ec