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

Tue Aug 5 18:28:09 UTC 2008

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 11:10 AM, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Magnus Manske
> <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Dror K <dror1975 at icqmail.com> 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.
>>
>> Why? Things have worked pretty well so far, on many projects.
>
> And on others, not so much.  We have projects where the community is
> dictated to by a vocal minority of administrators; we even have
> editors organized into hierarchies based on the quantity and quality
> of their contributions.  I've had administrators on minor-language
> Wikipedias stare at me blankly when I explained the concept of NPOV,
> and it was less than a year ago that we had to explain the notion of
> Free licensing to a not-so-minor language project, who, when informed
> that their "used with permission" images weren't acceptable under the
> GFDL, wanted the Foundation to pursue reusers after they re-tagged
> them GFDL.
>
> Back in Days of Yore, when our view was "if you build it, they will
> come," we set up lots of Wikipedias without actual communities of
> editors.  What filled the vacuum wasn't always connected with the
> broader Wikimedia community, and we shouldn't assume that everyone
> falls in line with the "mainstream" culture of our European-language
> projects.
>
> Austin