[Wikipedia-l] What would Richard Stallman say?

Thu Feb 19 18:11:55 UTC 2004

"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> writes:

> We should make it as good as possible within as wide a legal framework as
> possible.

Well, you've cut to the chase here.

When there's tension between these do we go for "good" 
or do we go for "as wide a legal framework".

I'm on the side of "Good."  

"Fair Use" images
i)  Make articles better
ii) Make it harder for future non-educational projects to exploit 
    the "codebase"

IMHO, (i) is an enormous upside, (ii) is a small downside, especially
considering that these projects
a) don't actually exist yet
   (and making sacrifices to solve non-existent problems is dumb)
b) are already fettered by the many other constraints of the GFDL
   (i.e. authorship credits, link-backs)

Now, we can be pragmatists, and work toward a really, really good
encyclopedia, or we can be dogmatists, and strive toward some abstractly
pre-defined definition of "freedom."

I've never cared for dogmatists, and I don't intend to become one now.
-- 
Gareth Owen
"The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity"
                  --  W. B. Yeats forsees the standard of debate on wikipedia-l