On 11/16/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
[snip]
The statement
will presumably be translated (both linguistically and culturally) into
as many languages as required, where it strikes me as normal that every
person will imagine in the context of a world vision unique his own
language and culture. We want a Yaqui person to imagine within the
context of a world not too dissimilar to that described by Castañeda.
Vision may not even be about language, so why restrict vision by
mentioning it.
Thank you, this was the point I was trying to make about our proposed
vision statement already capturing the required aspects of
multilinguality.
In fact I would be inclined to shorten the statement
even furtherr to
'''Imagine a world in which every person can freely share all
knowledge.'''
So, while I agree with every point of your reduction and I recognize
that my argument would apply to the initial draft just as well, I'm a
bit concerned that a vision of "Imagine a world in which every person
can freely share all knowledge" fails do differentiate us from
communications technology projects like Freenet
(
http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html) or a project to make 'Free
Hardware' networking equipment. :)
None of the current Wikimedia projects, for example, are currently
intended to facilitate the sharing of all fetish porn videos. But are
not these videos a part of all knowledge taken in the absolute sense?
"The sum of" is a pointless redundancy and
cliché.
To me, "The sum of" implies aggregation, distillation, and synthesis.
Perhaps my understanding of the words is unconventional?
In any case, I believe our vision should succinctly express an
intention to not merely facilitate a lossless retransmission of all
data, but to enable the world through repositories of knowledge in
the most useful and apropreiately accessible forms.
I thought "the sum of" took us closer to that...