[Foundation-l] Preservation of cultural diversity and minority languages

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The costs you are talking about are peanuts. Small projects do not cost us
much. What it will cost is a big blue eye for the Wikimedia Foundation
because its relevance will be seen as reduced. Apparantly you do not see
that by excluding languages you exclude the points of view that these
languages and their associated cultures provide. It is not hard to argue
that by starting to exclude these point of views, the WMF will no longer be
able to produce a complete view and consequently the neutral point of view
we aim for will be lost.

When the WMF does not want to host the less and least resourced languages
anymore, there is no need for WMF hosting. There is no need to be treated
like a beggar.  There are other organisations happy to take over any
community that does not feel at home anymore in the Wikimedia Foundation.
The question will be, will these communities be granted  the right of
departure ??? How do you think the WMF will be perceived when communities
start leaving  because they do not want to be treated as second class
citizens ???

Have you considered what a PR disaster this will be ?
Thanks,
     GerardM

On Feb 8, 2008 11:40 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Feb 8, 2008 11:49 AM, Yaroslav M. Blanter <putevod at mccme.ru> wrote:
> > I would like to ask the community: Are
> > the preservation of cultural diversity and minority languages
> (secondary)
> > Wikimedia goals?
>
> The WMF really shouldn't get into this kind of thing because it's too
> much. As Pathoschild mentioned, the WMF cannot pursue every noble
> goal. However, if people are truly interested in preservation of
> language, a separate foundation could be set up for that purpose.
> Something like "Wiki Language Preservation Society". Likely, a deal
> could be brokered between such an organization and the WMF to share
> server resources, although the later group would be responsible for
> maintaining the preservation projects, the associated domain names,
> pay for the bandwidth, contribute to operating the servers, contribute
> to paying the technical staff, etc. Such a group could probably
> actively pursue grants to capture and preserve dieing languages, which
> means there wouldnt be a competition between WLPS and WMF for
> donations.
>
> forgive me for brainstorming out loud. But, if people want to pursue
> goals which are tangent to the WMF's goals, they should really
> consider creating a new organization to pursue them, instead of trying
> to tack them on to the WMF's mission statement.
>
> --Andrew Whitworth
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>