I don't think you understand my position. I'm not arguing for an elimination of policy catering to non-U.S. countries. I'm arguing for a separation between languages and legalistic policy. We would have guides for editors from Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Such a guide would not be specific to the German Wikipedia.
Plenty of people in Germany edit the English Wikipedia. The current language-country ties don't account for those scenarios.
Arne Klempert wrote:
On 1/14/07, David Strauss david@fourkitchens.com wrote:
The biggest error I see here is that people are trying to limit language versions of Wikipedia so that they comply with the laws of the country where the language is primarily spoken. But that's fruitless.
No it's necessary, if we want to create *free* knowledge.
In an ideal world our content would comply with any law in any country. Of course this is almost impossible, so we have to make decisions, which laws are important to comply with and which aren't. And in some cases these decisions depend on language. To give you an example: IMHO it's fundamentally important to our mission that the content of the German Wikipedia complies at least with German, Austrian and Swiss law. Because these are the countries where the content is going to be used by third parties most likely.
Arne
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