[Foundation-l] {Spam?} Re: Swedish, Spanish, French Wikinews set up

[Ray Saintonge]

Anthere wrote:

> About 3 years ago, I ranted a lot about the right of minorities to say 
> their opinion and have it respected and taken into account.
>
> We are a diverse project, and we should preserve this diversity by 
> being respectful of local habits.
>
> Taking decision by majority vote, and imposing local communities the 
> wish of the global community is acceptable only when it does harm the 
> project not to all walk in the same direction with the same pace. 

This is the essence of maintaining vitality in our separate 
communities.  The policies that really matter are and should remain very 
few, and should be what define what is at the very heart of the project 
family.

> You may answer notafish with giving her the "big rules", "big 
> policies", "big guidelines" and other "big things" which were voted 
> on. This does not hide the fact wikinews is not welcome among us. Just 
> as wikiquotes, it will be a project in survival. I will not either 
> mention how many french people work on wikisource or wikispecies. 
> Wiktionary and wikibooks are below 50 edits per day as well. People 
> are doing great things on them, but even after 2 years, these projects 
> are still hardly resources. They will be great things later, but right 
> now, they still host small communities. 

As a person whose activities are focused on Wikisource and 
en:Wiktionary, I very much agree.  Surely I would like these projects to 
be broadly useful resources, but they can only become so by developing 
their own policies, and by finding their own forms of consensus.  These 
may be very different from what is agreed on other projects, notably the 
en:Wikipedia.  I can't say much about Wikinews, because I'm simply not 
interested in what happens there, and not particularly enthusiastic 
about it either.

> One of the very poor aspects of globalization is forcing communities 
> in a direction they are not ready to assume. It is forcing communities 
> to assume a standard of life which they can not handle. It is pushing 
> them to grow to fast, to run after more modern and developped ones. 

The depth of this perspective goes far beyond our wiki family.  
Globalization seems to be driven by a drive toward efficiency.  The 
Corporation is helped in maximizing its profits by maximizing the 
efficiency of its operations.  A mindset develops from that among the 
people who manage such systems, to the point that they often lose sight 
of why a project was undertaken in the first place.  Whe do _we_ need 
efficiency?

> A project governed by rules and policies before being governed by what 
> people wish is not what I wish for us.
>
> In my perspective, it is a huge disappointment. Huge because what wins 
> here is not what a community really wishes, it is a set of rules, 
> policies and such, drafted by a couple of people. It is not consensus, 
> it is the rule of the strongest. And local community wish crushed by 
> globalization. 

Certainly.  A totally new project will surely look towards other 
projects for guidelines.  It can examine those projects to see both what 
goes wrong and what goes right.  An early leader of a project will draw 
upon these for a first set of rules that will be needed just to make the 
project operational.  If he chooses those rules well they will be 
accepted by the community without much argument.  Ultimately, in these 
projects the rules will be drafted by a couple people; there's no 
escaping that because drafting rules involves a certain kind of language 
use.  But who does the drafting should not be important as long as the 
person is able to do that in a way that is sensitive to the feelings of 
the community.

Ec