[Foundation-l] Officially protesting against GerardM being the contactperson withregards to kennisnet

Thu Jul 28 09:29:52 UTC 2005

I am hereby officially protesting against GerardM being the 
contactperson with regards to kennisnet. He is manipulative, changes 
your own words, the words you wrote or said yourself. He never listens 
to others ideas.

> Waerth did send a mail asking if Kennisnet 

I never send a mail to kennisnet with regards to this I asked you in IRC!

> would be willing to pay for access to statistical content. 

Not correct. My full question was:

Many statistics bureaus give their data away for free partially or 
wholly, some ask a fee for the rest of their data mostly small. Would it 
be possible especially with regards to data for third world countries 
which isn't really obtainable without someone paying for it to get them 
to buy some of that data for us.

> Kennisnet, the portal organisation it is, cannot fulfil such a request. 

Because you hated the idea when I first proposed it, you told me it was 
a bad idea and you didn't want to ask me in the first place so I do not 
believe that you actually defended it or argued in favour of it. So I am 
thinking you used my idea to launch your own. which is under here, which 
everyone we spoke to about hates but only you like.

> There was however a discussion on how such data would be best hosted. 
> Localisation and versioning were discussed. When you have statistical 
> content, you want to know the date and the source of the content. アム 
> ステルダム, 암스테르담 and Амстердам have the same statistics it makes 
> little sense to store this in many projects. Consequently the 
> possibilities that Wikidata offer for this type of information and the 
> possibilities that the Ultimate Wiktionary offer for localisation need 
> to be considered. Kennisnet might consider helping with the creation 
> of the infrastructure for such a project.

Cool we have a database BUT NO DATA TO HOST IN IT ..... sounds like a 
great idea. The reason for the discrepacies between the projects are 
simple. As I pointed out on nl: I use for the countries I maintain the 
data from the statistical organizations, the official sources. On other 
wikipedia's they use unofficial estimates by sites such as 
citypopulation.de which are more often than not way off in respect to 
the official data, ever wondered why the Dutch wikipedia has a province 
more for Cambodia than all other wikipedia's? Because it is there and it 
was formed recently according to the statistical data, but try to say it 
on en: and it gets deleted. Now I do not feel that doing this in one 
central place will help. We will only get estimates which is a totally 
wrong thing, I rather have the data per wikipedia seperately so I can at 
least make sure the data as we have it on nl: is right. I have no time 
to go in heated arguments with a bunch of teenagers on en: who also 
happen to have found wikidata. Centralization is good, but not for 
everything. Yet another project would only harm wikimedia. As we get 
spread out to much especially a project that is overlapping with other 
projects.

Now for the end, as long as Gerard is not being questioned about his 
role with regards to kennisnet, nor the foundation is giving some 
opening as to what gerards actual mandates are I am against any further 
collaberation between the Dutch languaged wikimedia projects and Kennisnet.

Waerth/Walter van Kalken