[Foundation-l] Mission & Vision statement update

Thu Apr 26 23:56:38 UTC 2007

<rant>First of all, I want to rant about something.  I typed
"Wikimedia mission statement" into google, and of course the first
hits I get are from Wikipedia and have nothing to do with Wikimedia.
Sucks, but that's not what my rant is about.  My rant is about the
next set of hits:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_mission_statement  It's some
page that hasn't been updated in almost a year that says "Please use
this page to propose ideas for establishing a Wikimedia mission
statement."  Then the third set of hits goes to
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement, which has the
*old* version of the mission statement.  The sites are filled with
this outdated stuff.  It's really annoying.  It's certainly not
helping the communication problems that started this very thread.  And
I can't even edit all of it.  End of rant.</rant>

On 4/26/07, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/26/07, Anthony <wikilegal at inbox.org> wrote:
> > Erik says this is a clarification.  What was unclear which is being
> > clarified?
>
> I think this is the crux of the matter.
>
I hope we can get an answer from Erik before assuming anything, then.

> > Jussi-Ville says that the change eliminates "content in formats that
> > are under free licence".  What would be an example of such content?
> > Does this mean the WMF would support non-free content under an open
> > format?  Or are you saying that the new language allows for free
> > content in non-free formats?
>
> No, to be precise, I don't think the change eliminates content, but it
> does remove explicit commitment to formats under free licence. If it
> did not, why would Eric state that "adding" coverage of the same would
> be something we could envision in the future.
>
> My understanding is that "free licence" covered also the file formats
> being unencumbered, and specifying that *only* the content need be
> freely licenced is a backtracking of a serious significance.
>
I had a pretty long response here, but I'm going to remove it because
I think I'm just misreading something.

Anthony