Indeed, chapters have no jurisdiction over the content of the projects whatsoever - and they dont want that either. I dont think any chapter would be crazy enough to actually draft such a resolution in any binding tone.
It is true however that many chapters do important work for the local projects, and serve their local needs in the sense of activities, press contacts and fundraising in a more effective way (less culturally challanging, more sensitive to what works locally and better in touch with other activities and situations). Not all chapters do this in the same extent, and not all do it similarly good. But that is the idea of a chapter - it is not a fanclub organizing beer events only to have fun.
Best regards, Lodewijk
2011/8/9 Yaroslav M. Blanter putevod@mccme.ru
On Tue, 9 Aug 2011 10:11:49 -0500, Birgitte_sb@yahoo.com wrote:
And just to add to the argument, the projects are divided by language, and not by jurisdiction. Whereas in many cases it may be unimportant (for instance, we can safely assume that most of the activbities of the Swedish chapter are more related to Swedish-language projects, and if there is any chapter which "caters" to Swedisg-language projects it is the Swedish chapter), this is not correct for most of the major languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian ...)
You are quite right about the limitations of chapters. However, I don't see how these limiting factors are addressed by instead dealing with WMF directly. I think this is an example of "perfect being the enemy of
good
enough".
BirgitteSB
Well, to give an example, I am perfectly fine with the recent WMF resolution on BLP and I am willing to comply. However, if such a resolution were issued by one of the chapters (for this matter it is irrelevant which chapter would do it) I would not feel myself in any way obliged to comply with such a resolution. No chapter has any jurisdiction over the Russian Wikipedia to which I used to contribute and over English Wikipedia to which I contribute now.
Cheers Yaroslav
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