On 3/5/07, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, If you read carefully you will have noticed that there is no need for a consensus in all the projects. First of all, where the board makes a ruling that some things are not acceptable they are not acceptable.
Indeed. I don't expect that, in the current, highly diverse community of Wikimedia projects, there would _ever_ be consensus for either a strong position on freedom, or a strong position on inclusiveness. I would expect that support for freedom is higher among regular contributors. Importantly, it represents a core value that has been part of this project since the very beginning, even before Wikipedia itself was launched. It is useful to review the first public announcement on the Nupedia project, made in March 2000:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.sport.skating.ice.recreational/browse_thr...
"What does it mean to say the encyclopedia is "open content"? This means that anyone can use content taken from Nupedia articles for all purposes, both for-profit or non-profit ..."
(I also always find it interesting that this mission statement was already ambitious enough to suggest that Nupedia should "become the largest general encyclopedia in the history of humankind.")
Part of the job of the Board is to strengthen and build the support for freedom in our community, but that doesn't mean that we would ever abandon this principle -- even if a majority of contributors opposed it. It is a foundation value (with both a lower and upper case F).