Ron Ritzman wrote:
On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 8:29 AM, James Farrar james.farrar@gmail.com wrote:
Which brings up the question "What is Wikipedia?". Is meta-content like User: space and Wikipedia: space actually part of Wikipedia?
A question I thought of after reading [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angr this]. Is Wikipedia a free (libre) encyclopedia or a free (beer) encyclopedia that primarily uses a free (libre) license?
You can view it lots of different ways, I suppose. I personally consider Wikipedia primarily important as a *project* to produce a free (libre) encyclopedia. From that perspective, our primary product is the downloadable dumps. Once they exist, then the rest (distribution, online hosting, repackaging of subsets, etc.) can be done by dozens of other organizations. But producing the encyclopedia is much harder, which we're the only ones really doing on this scale---even if you included non-free projects.
That said, hosting said encyclopedia for free (gratis) public access does also happen to be quite useful for bolstering our primary role, in that it attracts editors, promotes our mission, attracts goodwill for providing a free (and ad-free) source of information, etc.
-Mark