On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Dror K dror1975@icqmail.com wrote:
Hello, Currently we have very few global principles for the Wikimeian projects, namely the GFDL principle and maybe the NPOV principle. We have many recommendations listed on the Meta, which are not taken seriously in many projects. Wikimedia projects have grown tremendously, and in my opinion, it has become crucial that the list of principles governing all projects be a little more detailed.
Why? Things have worked pretty well so far, on many projects.
And on others, not so much. We have projects where the community is dictated to by a vocal minority of administrators; we even have editors organized into hierarchies based on the quantity and quality of their contributions. I've had administrators on minor-language Wikipedias stare at me blankly when I explained the concept of NPOV, and it was less than a year ago that we had to explain the notion of Free licensing to a not-so-minor language project, who, when informed that their "used with permission" images weren't acceptable under the GFDL, wanted the Foundation to pursue reusers after they re-tagged them GFDL.
Back in Days of Yore, when our view was "if you build it, they will come," we set up lots of Wikipedias without actual communities of editors. What filled the vacuum wasn't always connected with the broader Wikimedia community, and we shouldn't assume that everyone falls in line with the "mainstream" culture of our European-language projects.
Austin