On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh(a)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