[Wikipedia-l] Openness is a means to an end. Nothing more

Fri Dec 2 00:04:42 UTC 2005

Hoi,
I think that having the best encyclopedia and having a free encyclopedia do
not exclude each other at all. If anything they are complimentary to each
other. We cannot create the most widely-used encyclopedia when people are
not free to use it. We can discuss some exceptions to this necessary
freedom, but we all do agree on the need for the Wikipedias to be Free.

Both of you in my opinion put the content first. The community is essential
in achieving our goal. It cannot be underestimated what value our community
has. We can lose half our content because with our community we can easily
rebuild it. We will have a hard time to even hang on to our current content
if we lose our community. Our community has a focus and this can be found in
our projects.

However and this is the core argument, this community exists to have this
large, widely used, in many languages encyclopedia available to all people
who have a need for it. As a Wikimedia Foundation we should not let this be
enough. There is so much more information that people need. What good is an
encyclopedia if it is all we have to give.. The aim of the WMF is much
broader than just Wikipedia.. This can be achieved as well if we work
together, when we are inclusive and allow all our projects and communities
to prosper.

Thanks,
    GerardM

On 12/1/05, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> Daniel Mayer wrote:
>
> >>>The entire goal of this project is freedom and openness.
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> >That is incorrect. The entire goal of this project is to create the
> largest, most widely-used, and
> >best encyclopedia in the world and to give that to everybody on the
> planet. Everything else, and I
> >mean *everything* (including our openness and the community itself), is a
> means to *that* end.
> >Nothing more.
> >
> >
> I strongly disagree with that---that may be your goal (and perhaps
> Jimbo's), but a goal of a lot of people here is to create a Free (as in
> Freedom) encyclopedia as the primary end.  The fact that this increases
> its availability is quite nice, but the Freedom aspect is not merely a
> means to the end of increasing availability, but the end itself.  For me
> at least, and I suspect at least some number of other people, this is
> the *only* end---to produce a completely Free encyclopedia, which
> everyone is then free to use as they wish, save that they may not
> restrict others' right to do the same with their derived works.  This
> then allows any third party to fulfill whatever end they have in mind,
> including disseminating it to every person on earth, editing it into
> other works, producing WikiReaders, producing travel guides, using it as
> source material for literary works, or whatever else.
>
> Were this not true, there would be a rival Gnupedia that many of us
> would be working on instead---The Gnupedia proposal was withdrawn only
> because Wikipedia serves this goal already.
>
> -Mark
>
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