On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
I fully agree with you. Any information is educational; it just depends of particular project scope would it be there or not. For example, you don't want to put Shakespeare's works on Wikipedia, because the proper place for it is Wikisource. Particular colony of ants is educational and could be interesting for making a photo of it, but it is not likely that it would get an article on Wikipedia. And so on.
But, why then Board decided to force "educational" component as mandatory in its statement? If there is no difference between "informational" and "educational", statement "we host only content that is both free and educational in nature" doesn't have a lot of sense, as it would sound like "we only host content which is free" (and that's the very known information), as "content" is more precise synonym for "information" (to be precise "content" could be interpreted as "set of information" or so).
So, I would like to know distinction between "informational" and "educational" interpreted by Board members; or it is, as you and Michael said, just not so common interpretation of the synonyms of the adjective "educational".
I doubt the language selection was parsed to such a degree. Whatever the difference, it's minor, and I seriously doubt they meant to exclude Wikinews (or, for that matter, the huge volume of data hosted on all the projects that is meta-content rather than outward-facing educational material) from the umbrella mission of the WMF. Seems like there are more substantial questions about the resolution the Board could address.
Nathan