[Wikipedia-l] Re: Announcing Wikimedia Foundation

Thu Jul 3 15:42:00 UTC 2003

rvalles-
> - Unprivilegiation of the English wikipedia: The way it's setup now
> (http://www.wikipedia.org = english. others are ?.wikipedia.org) is totally
> discriminative , offensive and degrading for the other languages,

Hyperbole is not very helpful. It is discriminating, yes, but "offensive  
and degrading" are terms that I am sure many people working on these other  
Wikipedias would disagree with. Our English Main Page prominently features  
links to the active Wikipedias in other languages, as well as a link to  
the list of all wikis in the very first sentence. If you speak Spanish, it  
is hard to miss the fact that there's a Spanish edition of Wikipedia.

Nevertheless, most of the developers agree that we want to make the switch  
to a multi language portal eventually. However, I personally would find it  
silly and offensive to put up an ugly plain static HTML page with just a  
bunch of links instead of our current Main Page (and frankly, all the  
drafts I've seen so far were ugly). Existing links to www.wikipedia.org  
articles would have to keep working anyway.

A multi language portal should have the following functionality:
- meta search on several wikis
- unified login system (trivial to code, but non-trivial to synchronize  
our existing accounts)
- unified interlanguage link table
- recent changes over several wikis
- auto highlight of language defined in web browser

There is still lots of work to do on more serious issues related to our  
software for us to focus what is an issue that only relatively few people  
have strong feelings about. However, if you and other people were to  
volunteer on addressing these issues, the multilanguage portal would come  
about much faster. Complaining rarely gets things done -- participating  
does.

> - Migration of all wikipedias to the phase3 software.

This is non-trivial because of the vastly different data structures.  
Currently there is only one person actively involved in the necessary  
process. If you want to speed it up, again, help us locate active  
developers who can help with the conversion, and we will certainly be as  
liberal as possible in handing out access to the server.

> - More openness in general, public discusion of decisions
> before them being made.

Virtually all of our decisions have public justification, either on the  
mailing list or on the wiki. Everyone working on Wikipedia has agreed that  
Jimbo has the right to veto all decisions; he is the founder of the  
project and has invested thousands of dollars to make it happen. He  
deserves our respect and gratitude. The FDL protects us from serious abuse  
of power, as your own fork demonstrates.

> -Distribution of the servers all arround the world,
> allowing every one of them to mirror backups for all the others,

While I sympathize with the idea, the Wikimedia foundation will allow us  
to raise the funds necessary to operate all wikis in one place. The  
aforementioned interlanguage integration will be much more difficult with  
distributed wikis.

> and
> avoiding this way any kind of censorship originated by having a single
> server unther the US laws.

Arguably, US law is the most liberal in terms of freedom of speech. Few  
other countries have such a strong commitment to what is the First  
Amendment in the US. Of course, US politicians try to undermine it  
whenever they can, but it still protects a lot of speech that is  
prosecuted elsewhere. You will find it very difficult to point to examples  
where content was "censored" from the English Wikipedia for reasons other  
than copyright.

Distributing servers will not help in addressing censorship concerns,  
since this will be viewed as merely a technical trick if the servers are  
legally controlled by the Wikimedia foundation. If they are not, we are no  
longer talking about an integrated project.

> Myself, I'm specially angry about the
> english-as-the-main-language-and-others-just-secoundary thing, and about it
> being not solved even after years listening to people asking so.

Years of listening? Wikipedia has been around since January 2001. What I  
find very frustrating is that people like yourself complain about certain  
things not being done when the cause of them not being done is not that  
people have a bad attitude towards you, but that there are simply not  
enough resources to complete them yet.

By forking your project, you have only worsened the problems, since now  
there exist different editions of Wikipedia with different versions of the  
same content, and a lot of duplicate work is done. There are different  
branches of the software and different groups of users. The justification  
for the fork was IMHO weak at best. Didn't you ever ask yourself why none  
of the other wikis have forked?

Everyone working on Wikipedia is doing so on their free time. When  
something is not getting done, the kind of "gimme" attitude that says  
"Either do what we want, and do it NOW, or we will fork" is very harmful.  
Above all else, people need to bring patience into a project such as ours.

> By the way, if you're interested in a spanish language free encyclopedia

There already is one. It's called the Wikipedia. If you have any content  
you wish to contribute to it, let us know.

Regards,

Erik