On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 1:18 PM, Stracke, Christian Christian.Stracke@icb.uni-due.de wrote:
You are mixing up reading and using of standards: Unfortunately ISO standards are currently not freely available and you have to pay for a copy. ISO is changing slowly their business and we have already asked for making these particular standards available for free. (For some standards with broad interest it is possible to make them available for free, decision is pending)
The usage of ISO standards is completely free: And also for your development team and for all people "who want to *use* our data". I'm convinced that all people does not want to read metadata standards but only the specialists: All people want that metadata are simply working well and providing good search and retrieval results. Therefore I do not understand your argument (but I agree that I would also prefer if this ISO standard MLR would be available for free). Maybe you can say that the standard is not free but the usage of the standard is free (and that is more important). Therefore I do not know why MLR should not be usable for a Wikipedia project.
Both cases are important. It's not enough for the standard to be freely usable.
Cheers Lydia