On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 04:35:51PM +0200, Timwi wrote:
Rotem,
I think you are working from a few assumptions, some of which may not
apply, and I would like to take some time to help you understand this.
Firstly, you seem to have a certain perception of possession. You seem
to think that if you are the one to create a Hebrew Wikipedia, you will
be the one to have full command over it. This is probably similar to how
some athors consider articles they write as "theirs" and get annoyed
when other people edit them; however, one of the fundamental basics of
Wikipedia is that we are a collaborative group, and neither an article,
nor a whole Wikipedia, is under the control of anyone.
Secondly, you seem to regard the Hebrew Wikipedia, or the idividiual
Wikipedias in general, as more separate than they actually are (or
should be). Although technically they are separate installations of the
Wikipedia software and use separate databases, they should ideally be,
or at least look like, parts of a whole. All the Wikipedias collectively
form the entire complete Wikipedia project. If you'd change the licence
of the Hebrew texts, it wouldn't be Wikipedia anyway. The different
language Wikipedias are interwoven in many ways not only by the
Inter-Wiki links, but also by ideologies like NPOV and the GFDL, as well
as a common PHP codebase that will remain the same for all of them.
It's you who is mistaken. It's not about any individual's control over
Hebrew Wikipedia, but about all Hebrew Wikipedians' control over it.
If you aren't Hebrew Wikipedian, why should you have anything to say
about that ?
Second, it's many individual Wikipedias, not one Wikipedia with many
languages, and it's going to stay that way. GFDL and NPOV are the only
policies that all Wikipedias must follow - about everything else -
and certainly the layout - should be decided by Wikipedians of each Wikipedia.