[Foundation-l] Re: [Wikinews-l] Chinese Wikinews: board action required

Mon Apr 18 05:35:39 UTC 2005

Erik, folks,

I've taken some time this weekend to read over the ZH Wikinews vote 
comments, and the concerns of the 13 opposed are quite interesting.

If you haven't been following it, the Chinese Internet is in a bad slump 
right now. There are occasional reports of Internet crackdowns in China, but 
the recent one should be a real concern. College campus Internet BBS systems 
have had severe restrictions imposed, and some have closed down. One of the 
best known Internet entrepreneurs had his personal site shut down by 
government order because of content posted on April Fools day. 

So many of the comments in the vote were in the spirit of, "It's not a good 
time to do something that will most definitely get roped into this mess." 
OTOH, some said this is exactly why it should be created, in that it will be 
a canary in the coal mine, so to speak. Just thought you'd be interested in 
the sentiment that they've expressed in the vote.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)

On 4/14/05, Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> There has now been a vote, organized by Formulax, among Chinese language
> Wikimedians on whether there should be a Chinese Wikinews.
> 
> The results are at:
> 
> http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E6%8A%95%E7%A5%A8/%E7%BB%B4%E5%9F%BA%E6%96%B0%E9%97%BB
> 
> In an amusing demonstration of the problems of voting, there were 13
> votes opposed to the project, 13 votes in support, and 1 vote with
> support only if compromises could be made about NPOV.
> 
> There was a larger vote earlier on whether this should be up to the
> global community to decide, or to the Chinese community. That vote was
> inconclusive, too, with opinions evenly split (50% want it to be a
> global decision, 50% want it to be a local decision) and very strong
> expressions of emotions on both sides.
> 
> We can continue voting until we get a nice result, but I think it would
> be best now for the board to make a decision about this.
> 
> My recommendation is a compromise: the project should go ahead under
> somewhat more rigid conditions (at least 10 support votes with at least
> 6 of them from Wikimedia regulars PLUS the process at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/New_language_pre-launch ). We can deal
> with problems of censorship as they arise.
> 
> Erik
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