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

Mon Aug 4 17:27:37 UTC 2008

I am divided about your email.

First, I think it should not be posted on Foundation-l. Foundation-l is 
the list of the Foundation, and should deal with Foundation topics. I 
believe the values (principles) related to Foundation have already been led.

1) in the mission statement :http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission
2) in the value statement: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Values

Either your email is about Wikipedia itself, and then, it should go to 
wikipedia-l

or, it is about all projects, in which case it should go to the meta list

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Second, I do agree with you clarity of "pillar" principles is necessary.

Imho, clarity of the pillars of Wikipedia is already achieved. 
Essentially, it is
* Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
* NPOV
* openness
* civility
* sources necessary / no original work
* free licence
* ignore all rules (except for the pillar rules)

If some projects ignore these pillar rules, they should be better 
informed. That's only a *communication* issue

However, the pillar principles of other projects (eg, Wikinews, 
Wikibooks etc...) do not seem to be clearly agreed, and sometimes differ 
between linguistic versions. That's unfortunate, and I agree more 
discussion is necessary. I remember that's a point I pushed in the past 
as well (but I fear with not much impact :-))

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Third, I STRONGLY support the fact that all linguistic versions should 
be left free of deciding the path they use to reach the global goal, as 
long as they respect the pillar values. Polls (use or not) is not a 
pillar value; as such, each community should be free to decide to use it 
or not. At best, what we can help with is to favor sharing of 
experiences and of best practices.

Ant

Dror K wrote:
> Hello,
> Currently we have very few global principles for the Wikimeian projects,
> namely the GFDL principle and maybe the NPOV principle. We have many
> recommendations listed on the Meta, which are not taken seriously in
> many projects. Wikimedia projects have grown tremendously, and in my
> opinion, it has become crucial that the list of principles governing all
> projects be a little more detailed. I suggest a few basic
> recommendations become obligatory. For example, [[meta:Polls are evil]]
> should become mandatory as a guideline to all projects. This article is
> very important as it put into practice the NPOV principle as well as the
> desicion-by-consensus and the differentiation between facts and views
> principles. I suppose there are other recommendation of this kind that
> should become mandatory guidelines. I am not suggesting a constitution
> or a full rule book. I do suggest to carefully single out several basic
> principles, since the projects' autonomy is a bit too wide, especially
> as we want to promote cross-contributions between projects.
> Dror
> 
> 
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