There has been a lot of chatter lately in the news about the potential
impact on charitable giving of the current economic crisis. I notice that
the 08/09 budget calls for Q2 revenues of $3.5M., a total annual donation
revenue of $6M and an annual revenue of $7.3M.
Since the bulk of the annual revenue is to be acquired in this quarter, and
the world is currently engaged in a serious financial crisis, what
adjustments or contingencies has the Foundation planned to mitigate a
downturn in gift revenue? The actual spending budget has a built in cushion
of $1.3M, but the budget indicates that the cash reserve as of the end of
September was anticipated to be in the hole $752. With a negative reserve, a
threat to revenue and a very poor borrowing environment are the finances of
the organization still secure?
Thanks,
Nathan
[1]"Economy Expected To Take a Tole on Charitable Giving"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/business/30foundations.html
[2]"In Tight Times, Many Nonprofits Feel the Pinch As Contributions Dwindle"
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/nyregion/07charities.html
[3]"Charities Are Bracing For Long, Hard Winter"
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1848864,00.html?imw=Y
I recall that in the interview Sue gave with the Wikipedia Weekly at
Wikimania, she mentioned that the Foundation staff and Board haven't
used the advisory council in a systematic way, and that strategies to do
so should be sought. Has any thought been put into how we can better use
that expertise, or if rethinking the advisory council is necessary?
Looking at the wiki, we have a good team of people, but they're only
useful if we tap that resource, instead of simply having blurbs on
advisory.wikimedia.org.
I don't know whether this should be addressed in the context of the
Wikimania postmortem or not, I was simply reminded as that's where the
interview was given.
-Mike
On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:58:08 +0000,
foundation-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org said:
> During August, staff and volunteers worked on a postmortem of Wikimania
> 2008, which included two IRC meetings and an online (LimeSurvey) survey
> of attendees, organizers and speakers. The postmortem is intended to
> reflect the experiences and views of all Wikimania planners and
> participants, and will result in a set of recommendations, to be
> implemented in time for the staging of Wikimania 2009. It will cover
> site selection, local planning and organization, logistics, program
> planning and speaker handling, scholarships, media/PR, public outreach,
> finance and administration, and sponsorships. Participating in the
> postmortem: Delphine Menard, Cary Bass, Jay Walsh, Kul Takanao Wadhwa,
> Frank Schulenburg, Veronique Kessler, Sue Gardner and 21 volunteers
> including members of the board and advisory board. The postmortem is
> expected to be complete in September or October: it currently awaits
> input from the local planning team, the program committee and scholarships.
--
Mike.lifeguard
mikelifeguard(a)fastmail.fm
FYI - and September will follow soon :-)
...
Report to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees
Covering: August 2008
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
Updated August 17, 2008
1. Funders' Briefing preparations (including materials such as
presentation, giving chart, annual report, etc.)
2. Developing funding proposals for several foundations
3. Orienting new fundraising team
4. Ongoing major donor solicitation and stewardship
5. Bits and pieces (Wikimania postmortem, office space revamp, launch of
NomCom, etc.)
THIS PAST MONTH
OUTREACH
Frank Schulenburg launched the first-ever “WikiProject Videos”
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Videos - a project
designed to encourage people to enrich Wikipedia with videos, and to
create a set of understandable and comprehensive online support
materials. Together with Wikimedia Germany, he has worked towards the
development of video tutorials and interviewed potential candidates to
present such tutorials. He also moderated an online course "Wikipedia
in Internet cafés for older people."
Frank visited Buenos Aires for a Wikipedia Academy planning meeting
called “Organising a Wikipedia Academy in seven steps,” and also met
with Argentinian chapter members in La Plata. With the help of Elizabeth
Bauer and WMAR, he created “cheat sheets” and a “101” in Spanish for the
Wikipedia Academy in Buenos Aires, set for October.
During August, the Wikimedia Foundation did some thinking about barriers
to participation: why some readers don't edit, and what we could do to
persuade them to try it. To that end, Sue Gardner, Frank Schulenburg
and others contributed to a page on meta called New Contributor
Objections
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Outreach/New_contributor_o….
The information on this page has since been used in several outreach
proposals prepared for grantmaking institutions.
During August, staff and volunteers worked on a postmortem of Wikimania
2008, which included two IRC meetings and an online (LimeSurvey) survey
of attendees, organizers and speakers. The postmortem is intended to
reflect the experiences and views of all Wikimania planners and
participants, and will result in a set of recommendations, to be
implemented in time for the staging of Wikimania 2009. It will cover
site selection, local planning and organization, logistics, program
planning and speaker handling, scholarships, media/PR, public outreach,
finance and administration, and sponsorships. Participating in the
postmortem: Delphine Menard, Cary Bass, Jay Walsh, Kul Takanao Wadhwa,
Frank Schulenburg, Veronique Kessler, Sue Gardner and 21 volunteers
including members of the board and advisory board. The postmortem is
expected to be complete in September or October: it currently awaits
input from the local planning team, the program committee and scholarships.
FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS
On August 4, invitations went out for the Funders' Briefing to be held
at the Sloan Foundation in New York on September 11, 2008. Current
confirmed guests include representatives from the Ford, Hewlett, Surdna,
Sunlight and Stanton Foundations , the Open Society Institute, and
National Geographic. Attending the briefing from WMF will be Erik
Möller, Sara Crouse, Rebecca Handler, Stu West and me.
On August 15, invitations went out for the San Francisco Funders'
Briefing to be held at Kapor Enterprises on September 23, 2008. Current
confirmed guests include representatives from the Stanton, Moore and
Gates Foundations as well as representatives from the Omidyar Network,
and individual prospective donors.
On August 25, Anya Shyrokova joined the staff of the Wikimedia
Foundation as our new Development Associate. Anya, who speaks fluent
Russian and Ukrainian, is a recent graduate of the University of
California, Berkeley, with a double major in International Political
Economy and Molecular Cell Biology. As Development Associate, she will
act as donor record manager and help with prospecting and major gift
appeals.
A major grant proposal related to translations and public outreach has
been developed and submitted.
We've begun analyzing potential credit card processing solutions for the
online fundraiser.
There were 989 donations in the month of August, totalling USD 34,330.24.
COMMUNICATIONS
Throughout August, Jay worked on the Wikimedia Foundation's first-ever
Annual Report covering the fiscal year 2007-08. He expects to have a
preliminary version available for the Funders' Briefings, which will not
include the audited financial statements. That version will be replaced
by a version including the statements, once the audit is complete and
the statements are ready to be published. That will probably happen in
October.
There were no press releases in the month of August, but we responded to
media inquiries from the Columbia Journalism School, San Francisco
magazine, Wired magazine, Jobsinthemoney.com, the Municipalist, the San
Francisco Chronicle newspaper, the IT website Tech Target, the
Washington Post newspaper, El Mercurio, the New York Times, the Wall
Street Journal, tech career website Dice.com, Advancing Philanthropy
Magazine, Politico, Bloomberg.com, PC World, and Super Lawyers magazine.
TECHNOLOGY
We've received and put into service the first batch of hardware
(primarily database servers) generously sponsored by the Stanton
Foundation. New employees in the San Francisco office include Michael
Dale, who is being sponsored by Kaltura and working on a 100% open
source video editing solution and Tomasz Finc, our new full-time
software developer. An additional part-time contractor is helping in our
Tampa data-center where we are moving forward with addition of new
rack-space by a different provider in the same building. The new space
will allow us to more effectively deploy new servers and maintain active
on-site backups of key data. Data dumps are temporarily on hold until
some of the new file server deployments are completed, due to space
constraints on old servers.
The Wiki-to-PDF extension was enabled on http://en.labs.wikimedia.org ,
and the Wikibooks community was invited to test the extension. Many
issues were addressed throughout the month, such as the addition of a
feature to exclude selected templates from printing. A Wikimedia/Wikia
tech meeting took place to identify potential areas of cooperation, such
as Wikia's improvements to Erik Zachte's Wikistats scripts and Wikia's
work on the Varnish caching server. Also, a new experimental handheld
style-sheet is being tested for mobile devices.
Significant progress has been made on auditing and normalizing our
software installations, making it easier for us to manage the site, fix
broken installs, and set up new servers and new services. Progress has
also been made on cleaning up our domain name situation: ownership,
contact information, and DNS setup is being normalized.
FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION
Most of August was spent preparing for and working with the auditors. We
also brought in a part-time Human Resources consultant to audit our
personnel files and do other HR-related work.
OTHER
On August 23, Michael Snow briefed the Nominating Committee on behalf of
the board, in an IRC meeting. The job of the Nominating Committee is to
identify, research and recommend candidates for the appointed Board
positions involving "specific expertise." Its members are board member
Ting Chen, community member Milos Rancic, community member BirgitteSB,
advisory board member Melissa Hagemann, Executive Director Sue Gardner
and board chair Michael Snow. The Nominating Committee intends to
generate criteria for potential “specific expertise” board members here
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/meta/wiki/Nominating_Committee/Selec…
by September 15, and brainstorm names of potential board members (on a
private wiki) by September 30. The four “expertise” seats are expected
to be filled by January 2009.
IN COMING WEEKS
* Funders' Briefings in New York and San Francisco
* Board meeting being held October 4, 5 & 6 at the WMF office.
* All-staff meeting being held November 6 & 7 at the WMF office.
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment: help us make it a
reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
As I have been informed at Meta, the legal disclaimers of the wikipedia in
english were formulated by a lawyer of the foundation, and it's content is
beyond discussion or consensus of the community of users. If one day there's
the need to modify something of it, it would be decided by the foundation.
By logic, the same thing would apply to the disclaimers of all wikipedias,
wich are traductions of the one in english. But are those disclaimers
binding documents in the legal sense, or just of informative purposes? The
GNU free documentation license states "In case of a disagreement between the
translation and the original version of this License or a notice or
disclaimer, the original version will prevail", does something similar
applies between disclaimers of wikipedia?
Let's provide a working example of this. The disclaimer of the wikipedia in
spanish, located at
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Limitaci%C3%B3n_general_de_responsab…,
does not include any mention to the paragraph "Jurisdiction and
legality
of content" of the version in english, wich states that the database is
maintained in reference to the protections afforded under local and federal
law of the state of Florida, in the United States. Far from being just a
part that was missing due to an incomplete translation, I have seen that
some users, including some admins, deliberately refuse to acknowledge the
authority of US law over the content of wikipedia, either as a plot to
prevent consensus about non-free content from ever happening or as a
mistaken display of patriotism. As far as I understand (but correct me if
I'm wrong) being written in spanish and having a huge majority of admins and
users from spanish speaking countries rather than from the US do not erase
the ties with the US and turn the laws of Spain, Argentina, Venezuela or
other spanish speaking countries into the only ones the project would answer
to.
What's the situation, then? Can those things be done, or does the law of the
US apply to all projects regardless of users liking it or not? Can wikis in
non-english languajes be allowed to interpret and write the legal disclaimer
as they see fit, or should a version written or supervised by the foundation
be enforced?
Hi everyone,
The following is my belated, rather long, 2 cents regarding the creation of
wikipedias for languages/dialects/whatever-you-want-to-call-them that stem
from Arabic, this is mainly relevant to the creation of the Masry (Egyptian)
Wikipedia, the Masry Wikitionary proposals (by virtue of the fact that I am
Egyptian, and thus I can relate to those two projects with a better degree
of confidence), but probably is still relevant for the proposals that
subsequently stemmed for Morrocan, Lebanese, Sudanese and more will come I
am sure.
Let me state first though, that even though it will be obvious from my
concerns below that I am against such a division (slightly oppose, to be
precise), I have no opinion as to whether those languages or dialects (as
proponents and opponents would call them) are really separate languages or
not. I have some issues and worries, which is what I will expand on below,
but ultimately, I don't know if what I speak is actually classified as a
separate language or a dialect (yeah I am that ignorant :P ) so from the
specific rules-based linguistic-jargon point of view, I am sadly out of my
league.
That stated, here is what basically worries me:
I have read most of the (rather heated) arguments for and against the
proposals, here is what I understand (from a layman point of view) about my
language: I speak Egyptian, which is a form of Arabic, it is not the same as
'formal' Arabic, however, it is only spoken in most of the cases. I think
the majority of the body of literature written by Egyptians is written in
formal Arabic. I simply come to this conclusion because as an avid reader I
must have come across only one or two literary pieces written in Egyptian
Arabic as 'pioneering experimental' works (as one author called his stuff).
Also the way of writing is not agreed upon by egyptians themselves, for
example: words that contains the letter Kaaf (ق), I saw some of the authors
who tried writing a word containing it in 'Masry' would keep it as is and
other people would convert it to 'Hamza' as it is actually pronounced but is
rather foreign to read. I can safely assume that almost all literate
Egyptians who read and write in formal Arabic (actually that *is* the
definition of being literate in Egypt) will find reading their own every day
talking language rather alien (kind of ridiculous, but is the case IMHO).
The point I am trying to make here is : For a language/dialect that has only
been spoken till now for the most part, Wikipedia turning it into a written
language would be 'original research' and this is what I actually observed
in Wikipedia Masry, people write as they please, and the result is sometimes
palatable and some times very foreign and alienating (as a method of
delivering information). I suspect the same would be the case for at least
the Lebanese and Sudanese proposals for example, ditto if there will ever be
a proposal for the gulf dialects (Saudi, Yemeni, etc.), the Egyptian Sai'di
(upper Egypt dialect), etc...
My second concern is, I am worried about duplicating the efforts in the name
of language separation, granted, I speak something that is not similar to
formal Arabic etymology-wise maybe. However, there is not one literate
Arabic-speaking person who can claim he understands written
Egyptian/Lebanese/etc. and not understand formal Arabic (by virtue of the
the above argument that my language is mostly spoken, and what is taught in
schools, and used in everyday written communication is formal Arabic). I
dont know if it is good, given the already low participation level in my
area of the world, to let people have Egyptian/Lebanese/Saudi/Yemeni
mini-wiki projects, keeping in mind that all users of those will be
perfectly comfortable reading the information in the Arabic corresponding
project.
Finally, I think the division is not purely language related, there is a lot
of socio-political issues at work, taking the Egyptian wikipedia again as an
example, there has been a considerable debate in Egypt about getting the
Egyptian language to be adopted writing-wise (and to make the grammar more
solid so as it would overcome the current problems in writing) to bolster
the national identity of Egypt, while this proposal is currently going
nowhere, it wont be hard to imagine groups interested in promoting this
canvassing just to prove their point, do we want to get involved in such an
argument? is it wikipedia's place to? isnt such a statement already made by
Wikimedia creating one of the first bodies of written text in the language?
I understand that it may be too late for Egyptian Wikipedia, the decision is
apparently already in, but I am currently seeing a slew of similar
proposals,so I thought there should be some kind of discussion regarding the
broader topic and not restricted to the proposal pages. I hope I haven't
spammed this list with this email :).
Best Regards,
Muhammad Alsebaey
Is there any strategy document that describes what kind of functionality
we want in Mediawiki, and why we want it? For the moment it seems like
the development are drifting in some general direction but without any
real specific goal.
It seems like there are no such document at mediawiki.org or on meta,
yet there are some rather old docs about specific hardware issues. Same
on wikimediafoundation.org, there are some references on pages about job
openings but thats all.
The closest I could get to such a document is "Update of Foundation
organization (March 07)"
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Update_of_Foundation_organization_(Marc…)
and the document "10 wishes for 2008"
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/10_wishes_for_2008)
I believe that some kind of document, describing whats important to add
to Mediawiki, and why, is very important for the overall community. This
would give us an opportunity to clarify why we want to do something and
how we would like to do such a thing. It will also make it possible to
approach specific benefactors, patrons and donors, especially those that
share a common goal with us.
Where should such a document be made, and who should write it? I guess
it should clearly state why we want a specific functionality. To make an
example, the 2007-document talks about wap functionality; why do we want
it and where is it documented in full detail. The page about the
functionality should point to all relevant bugs, code and discussions,
while the overall document should clearly describe why we want it.
Note that this not a document to block all those that want to write some
kind of funny extension, it is a document to describe what we think is
important to do.
John
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> Hoi,
> It is quite simple; I asked for a comment and I got as an answer that
> the Arabic languages were not different from other languages we
> considered. Nobody dissented. After a week I gave the eligible status
> to Egyptian Arabic and we have a precedent for the eligibility for the
> Arabic languages. This is what I have reported several times already...
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de
> <mailto:wing.philopp@gmx.de>> wrote:
>
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
>
> Hoi,
> Transparancy exists when it is clear what has been said and
> done. You do not need the exact text and you do not need to
> know every detail. All relevant details have been made public.
> You know that the information was truthful because otherwise I
> would have been corrected.
> Thanks,
> Gerard
> On Wed, Oct 8, 2008 at 11:28 AM, Ting Chen
> <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de <mailto:wing.philopp@gmx.de>
> <mailto:wing.philopp@gmx.de <mailto:wing.philopp@gmx.de>>> wrote:
>
> Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > Happy that you agree that we are doing a good job.
> >
> > As to finding another expert, I am quite happy with the
> one we
> have. Your
> > proposal that we say something along the lines you
> indicate is not
> > practical. For your information, you do work also in a
> non-observable way.
> > Why should your work be different ?
> > Thanks,
> > Gerard
> >
> >
>
> Personnally, I would vote against any decision on the board
> that
> cannot
> be made transparent. Sorry.
>
> Ting
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> <mailto:foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> <mailto:foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> <mailto:foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>>
>
> Unsubscribe:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
> I don't understand you. Sorry. Milos said you need not publish
> names, just arguments that are exchanged. You answered him that
> this is not possible. So, whatever decision you made, the
> arguments that are exchanged inside the LangCom that ultimately
> resulted in the decision cannot be published. If this is not
> intransparent I don't know what is.
>
> Ting
>
>
Well, in this case I agree with Milos, that you should have asked one
more expert. In principle you asked an anonymous expert and he made a
statement. This statement is made without argumentations and reasons.
The members of the committee accepted this statement without
argumentation and the decision is made.
Because the issue is sensible, and because there are objections inside
the community, I find the decision process described above not very
reassuring.
Ting
I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss open standards and file
formats in advance of the next board meeting. I'd especially like to
look at how these issues relate to our mission. There are a variety of
questions involved, which I'll summarize in terms of freedom - the
freedom that providing access to knowledge can give the recipient, and
the freedom that avoiding intellectual property restrictions can give
our culture generally. I trust we'd all agree both of these are positive
things in line with the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, which is what
makes it difficult if we have to choose between them.
The more we move beyond simple text, the more intellectual property
restrictions expand beyond simple copyright to increasing complexity
(multiple rightsholders, patents, DRM, trademarks, database rights).
Sometimes these things can be fairly benign, to the extent of being at
least gratis-free, especially at the "consumer" level. Perhaps in terms
of our effort to provide access to knowledge, they might not impose any
real restrictions, except in extreme edge cases. But so far, we have a
pretty strong commitment to absolute freedom, even with respect to areas
that don't directly impact our work.
To illustrate this with an example, maybe not the best but one that
comes up often enough, consider video file formats. (Some of this is
beyond my technical expertise, so please forgive any misstatements.)
Adobe Flash has widespread adoption to the point of being
near-universal. The company has also been moving to make it more open
for people watching, distributing, and working on content in this
environment. It's close to free, but I understand there are still some
issues like patent "encumbrances" around Flash. Meanwhile, there are
pure free software formats that do similar things but have pretty
limited adoption.
This brings up a number of questions. First of all, how important is
multimedia content to us in general? Considering both the investment to
create it and the environment in which it's produced, historically it's
a lot less amenable to free licensing. It's still useful, no doubt, but
what measures should we take to promote it?
Back to the two manifestations of freedom I mentioned, how should we
balance those? One possibility that's been raised is to allow Flash
content so long as we require that it be encoded and distributed in a
truly free format as well. Is that sort of approach an acceptable
compromise? It would make it much easier to achieve wide distribution of
free content, while still making sure that it's also available
completely without restrictions, for those who find that important. Are
there situations in which this compromise doesn't work out for some
reason? Why? (And none of this has to be limited to the Flash video
example, discussion of other formats and standards is welcome.)
In dealing with the limited adoption of certain free formats, some
people have advocated a more evangelistic approach, if you will. Given
the reach of Wikipedia in particular, it's suggested that our policy
could push wider adoption of these formats. That may be, but the
question is, how much is that push worth? What are the prospects for
making those formats readable in the average reader's environment, and
encouraging wider use as a standard? Does an uncompromising approach
result in significant progress, or would we simply be marginalizing the
impact of our work? And is it worth the "sacrifice" of the many people
who would miss out on some of the knowledge we're sharing, because the
free format isn't accessible to them? (That's also partly a problem of
disseminating knowledge, of course.) If we adopt a compromise position
as described earlier, how much do we lose in terms of promoting the
freer formats?
Before I joined the board, I understand the board considered a
resolution to create a file format policy. These are the kinds of
questions we need to consider before we can set such a policy. We're not
going to be passing anything at next week's meeting, though, the
discussion isn't far enough along and it wouldn't be right to push it
through with so little consultation. But we need to have the
conversation, so I would like the community's feedback on this list,
both now and feel free to continue during and after our meeting.
--Michael Snow
I've come up with two tests which can be applied to issues like the
file format discussion in order to reach the determinations which I
believe to be most correct.
==Two Tests for the freeness of activities related to project content==
===Impoverished/principled reader test===
Imagine people who are sufficiently impoverished that they can only
afford zero cost software or who are sufficiently concerned about
their freedom that they only use legally licensed Free Software. Does
taking the action discriminate against these people? Does taking the
action give them a materially lesser experience?
===Impoverished/principled author test===
Imagine a collection of authors or publishers who are sufficiently
impoverished that they can only afford zero cost software or who are
sufficiently concerned about their freedom that they only use and
distribute legally licensed Free Software. Would they be able to take
the same or materially equivalent action related to their own content?
=== Examples ===
====Using a free software flash module to support clients which can't
handle the HTML <canvas> tag====
This passes the impoverished reader test: The impoverished reader can
be given the <canvas> tag which has equal or better functionality OR
the reader could legally use Gnash.
This passes the impoverished author test: The impoverished author
could legally perform the exact same action while paying no fees nor
using/distributing any software which was not freely licensed.
====Parallel distribution of Video in both Ogg/Theora and Flash Video
because Flash video is more widely adopted====
I think this passes the impoverished reader test: The impoverished
reader can view the Ogg/Theora file, and the differences in
quality/bitrate are neither likely to be material nor were
contributing factors in the decision to offer Flash Video.
However, this clearly *fails* the impoverished author test: The
impoverished author can not legally engage in parallel distribution
himself without paying codec licensing for encoders and fees for the
distribution of material in the licensed format. The author could
distribute exclusively Ogg/Theora, but that wouldn't be equivalent
because it has significantly less adoption (and that was the reason to
consider parallel distribution in the first case).
====Parallel distribution of hypertext in an eBook format where only
*reading* tools were non-free, and some free ebook formats====
What if a format is totally free to authors/publishers but isn't
useful without a non-free reader? I believe this has been for some
ebook formats, at some points in time. We'll presume that the free
format isn't materially worse than the non-free one.
This passes the impoverished reader test: The impoverished reader can
use the free ebook format.
This passes the impoverished author test: He's free to turn out ebooks
in both formats just like we are.
It was re-reading some of Geni's posts that made me think of
describing this "impoverished author" test. Much of Wikimedia's
mission isn't merely providing read-only content at no cost to the
public, it's also a mission of enabling authorship by building a
collection of works that others can build upon. It's isn't good
enough that our content be available to free software users, it also
must be free for authors to emulate, modify, and/or republish. As
such, both tests are equally important.
I wouldn't presume to apply these tests to things unrelated to the
content (all that stuff our users are creating and posting in the
projects) such as Wikimedia office activities: Our mission is one of
enabling the world through freely licensed educational materials, not
the creation/promotion of freely licensed office materials. (Although
there are practical and ethical reasons outside of the Wikimedia
mission why preferring freely licensed solutions is generally good...)
Thoughts? Holes? Better restatements?
> However, go to en.wp, read essays [1] there and you will see a lot of
> very POV articles. And while those articles are inside of Wikipedia:
> name space and reasonably worded they are not a problem.
* CPOV does not exist (as a official policy)
* Absit injuria verbis en.wiki is chaotic (it is, sorry ) and there's
no valid logical proof which say something like:
"is ok for en.wiki so must be ok for all wikies"
> The sense of the introduction [2] in the document is a romantic in
> favor of promoting local languages against cultural imperialism.
No. You are thinking like imperialist here: the point is *not* good
ol' time when man was a man and anglosaxon lived in their country and
"we" speak our languags. They was saying (they remove) that their
pourpose as wikipedians is fight diffusion of english as worldwide
language.
If you are still thinking that this is coherent with wikipedia
something wrong is happening here.
> English Wikipedia has stronger statements about freedom of knowledge
That statements are WMF/wikipedia/wikipedians official POV. Sorry but
is different.
> Message: 10
> Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 09:43:14 +0200
> From: "Gerard Meijssen" <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
> Hoi,
<quote>
> When the Piedmontese Wikipedia is of the opinion that Italian or English is
> in principle not welcome, I think they are in their right to say so.
</quote>
Thats why I think that lang come should be closed or, at least
reformed with different people: this is non sense in my POV.
--
Meno male
che Silvio c'è