On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 5:42 AM, Renata St renatawiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
The most important principle for any edition of Wikipedia is to build an encyclopedia. So, it's not freedom.
That's not a principle, that's a goal. And Florence very nicely put it, "left free of deciding the path they use to reach the global goal." That's freedom I am talking about.
There is a set of relatively strict rules around building an encyclopedia, like:
- Encyclopedia is ideologically a positivist project. There is no such thing like, for example, an encyclopedia based on post-modernist (whatever that means) principles. - A derivative of the scientific method, the encyclopedic method, has to be applied strictly. There is no space for, let's say, applying methods of some religion in building an encyclopedia. - Encyclopedia is not an original research and, ideally, every claim has to be sourced. - While opinions are welcome if they are based on sources, one encyclopedic article mustn't be biased. - And so on. The most of basic principles described at the Wikipedia in English describe such rules.
The point here is that we don't need to be ideologically positivists, we don't need to apply scientific method in our personal lives, etc., but if we are building an encyclopedia, we have to apply those principles on building it. Otherwise, we wouldn't build an encyclopedia, but something else.
While our social relations should be free, there are a lot of rules (and rules are not free) which lay behind building an encyclopedia. And it is not possible to build an encyclopedia without following those rules. So, yes, every project should have some level of freedom (mostly related to the social relations), but every project has to apply rules which are about building an encyclopedia (of course, if the project is a Wikipedia; if it is, let's say, a Wikinews, it has to apply rules related to building a news agency).
While it is problematic to talk about "freedom" because interpretations of that word are not so consistent, it is dangerous to try to apply the most of semantic space of the word "freedom" to any kind of scientific (and thus, encyclopedic) work. Which means that we are far from from your construction "I think the only global principle that's true to all projects is FREEDOM.". You may define which freedoms all projects have, but strong positions like your is are far from reality, as well as they are dangerous.