Op donderdag 28 december 2006 21:42, schreef Brion
Vibber:
JeroenVP for instance has made clear that he does
not care about the
core values of Wikipedia at all (making knowledge
available to the
public as free content) but only cares about not
ever seeing anything he
perceives as an "advertisement".
I assume the above statement is a way to polarise
the discussion ever more and
I will ignore these remarks.
It's about free/open educational content.
It's
about making materials
open and available for use by the public,
including the creation of
derivative works and redistribution.
Exactly, but you you miss the point completely
Brion. It's advertisement at a
location where the free content is CREATED, not
redistributed/mirrored.
Actually I don't care about if people make money
with Wikipedia content, the
same applies for Linux distributions, but we are
talking about advertisement
on the location where the content is created. That
kills our reliability, so
far we have that allready. It's not about
business-models, websites, but
about the source off the free content. Any
connection to what kind of
company, religion, political party, government,
whatever... will harm one of
the basic principles of this great project.
There is no difference between where the content is
created and distributed and consumed. It is all the
the same place. The high number of hits logged by
Wikimedia websites would not be happening if the
primary consumption of the content took place at the
mirrors. The success of Wikimedia is due to this
elimination this idea that content is something to be
created and then distibuted to consumer. In Wikimedia
creation and consumption are combined and anyone is
welcome to either create or consume (or both!) from
the same outlet.
I want to explain were I think the general opposition
to advertisement comes from. While brion is correct
that free-content is not against commercialism; free
content is against consumerism. Advertising is a
large part of the culture of consumerism. This is a
culture that *is* at odds with the ideas of Wikimedia.
This is where I believe the strong reaction against
ads stems from more than anti-commercialism.
I think it is natural for people with a strong dislike
for the consumer culture to make there way to
Wikimedia. It is natural that these people suddenly
seeing a multinational coporation in the site-notice
would have a bad reaction. I think the reasoning
behind the sitenotice display is sound and I support
the decision. But perhaps I would have been upset if
I had not already expected to see coporate matching
donors. It is hard to say, I am really not that
radical. At the same time I have seen many people who
I think are radical in their related areas defend this
sitenotice. This makes me think the bulk of the
reaction is really due to the surprise factor. Maybe
the lesson here is that there is a need for better
internal new releases.
I think Brad's annoucement of the beginning of the
fundraising drive was very good. If it had had a
footer silmilar to what the Wikimania Tapai team has
been doing, encouraging people to forward it and
spread it to other lists, maybe there would have been
less uproar. It is sometimes hard to remember how
much of a communication problem still remains within
this organiztion. Six months ago it was nearly
impossible to know what happening at the Foundation
level. Now there are annoucements, reports, and even
timetables! But this is not being spread much through
the larger community. I think the LSS is a great step
forward, perhaps it is time to not only list this on
meta but make weekly "deliveries" to the village pumps
of small communities and ask any larger communities
with internal news programs to host within those
programs.
Birgitte SB
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