Poor, Edmund W wrote:
Imagine a poor country with a non-democratic
government. They want to
educate their people, but they are unwilling to tolerate some small
number of ideas. Should we make it DIFFICULT or EASY for them to select
a subset of articles for an Encyclopedia of Lessitania?
The GFDL makes it perfectly legal for anyone to do whatever they want
with all or part of the articles (besides take them proprietary). So
the government of Lessitania is free to distribute Wikipedia with all
the articles that speak critically of their leaders removed or
sanitized. That doesn't mean that the Wikimedia Foundation ought to set
up a special version of the encyclopedia where we ourselves cull and
censor the articles to cater to the whims of the government of
Lessitania. Indeed, I would oppose hosting such a project on our
servers, since "satisfying the political concerns of the government of
Lessitania" isn't part of our mission.
-Mark