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

Sat Aug 9 05:49:25 UTC 2008

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Renata St <renatawiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The most important principle for any edition of Wikipedia is to build
>> an encyclopedia. So, it's not freedom.
>
> That's not a principle, that's a goal. And Florence very nicely put it,
> "left free of deciding the path they use to reach the global goal." That's
> freedom I am talking about.

There is a set of relatively strict rules around building an encyclopedia, like:

- Encyclopedia is ideologically a positivist project. There is no such
thing like, for example, an encyclopedia based on post-modernist
(whatever that means) principles.
- A derivative of the scientific method, the encyclopedic method, has
to be applied strictly. There is no space for, let's say, applying
methods of some religion in building an encyclopedia.
- Encyclopedia is not an original research and, ideally, every claim
has to be sourced.
- While opinions are welcome if they are based on sources, one
encyclopedic article mustn't be biased.
- And so on. The most of basic principles described at the Wikipedia
in English describe such rules.

The point here is that we don't need to be ideologically positivists,
we don't need to apply scientific method in our personal lives, etc.,
but if we are building an encyclopedia, we have to apply those
principles on building it. Otherwise, we wouldn't build an
encyclopedia, but something else.

While our social relations should be free, there are a lot of rules
(and rules are not free) which lay behind building an encyclopedia.
And it is not possible to build an encyclopedia without following
those rules. So, yes, every project should have some level of freedom
(mostly related to the social relations), but every project has to
apply rules which are about building an encyclopedia (of course, if
the project is a Wikipedia; if it is, let's say, a Wikinews, it has to
apply rules related to building a news agency).

While it is problematic to talk about "freedom" because
interpretations of that word are not so consistent, it is dangerous to
try to apply the most of semantic space of the word "freedom" to any
kind of scientific (and thus, encyclopedic) work. Which means that we
are far from from your construction "I think the only global principle
that's true to all projects is FREEDOM.". You may define which
freedoms all projects have, but strong positions like your is are far
from reality, as well as they are dangerous.