[Foundation-l] It is high time we decided upon global Wikimedianprinciples

Mon Aug 4 14:45:12 UTC 2008

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 10:24 AM, Mohamed Magdy <mohamed.m.k at gmail.com> wrote:
> Like global policy pack that could be imported to new Wikipedias?
>
> This is a good idea.

A good idea for new Wikipedias, maybe. It's only going to be useful if
it includes only the important fundamentals, and is not loaded up with
all sorts of bureaucratic cruft. The given example, [[meta:Polls are
evil]] seems to me to be a particularly poor choice because it's
unnecessary and seeks to impose behavior guidelines on a community
that might not need them. There's a difference between saying "This is
a list of requirements that a WMF project must satisfy" and "Here are
a list of principles that en.wikipedia has embraced and wants to push
onto other projects".

As for sister projects, I think it's a lousy idea. We can't have
global policies that affect all projects, because the various projects
are run so differently. A newly-created Wikibooks, for instance, would
need a different "starter pack" of policies and templates then a new
Wikiquote would. Even something such as NPOV, which seems to be such a
hallowed standard on Wikipedia is treated surprisingly different on
Wikiversity or Wikisource. Even Wikinews uses a different license that
isn't completely GFDL-compatible, at least not bidirectionally.

If I had to pick some guidelines which truely should be global to all
projects and languages, it would be a very short list (and some of
these are probably pushing it):

1) The project should allow some form of anonymous content contributions
2) The project should not prevent people from creating new accounts
(except from known vandal IPs, of course)
3) The project must follow the privacy policy, and the checkuser
policy (where applicable)
4) The project should use an acceptable free content license, must
obey the requirements of that license as best as is technically
possible, and must attempt to prevent the use of the project for
copyright violations (whatever that means, in whatever jurisdiction it
means it in)

I  can't really think of much more then this that is truely "global",
and I'm certain even these are going to draw criticisms. My point here
being that there aren't any real policies that can be made global, at
least not when we consider the needs of all the sister projects.

--Andrew Whitworth