On 9/1/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
This strikes me as somewhat reversed from our typical practice---we have goals, like creating a neutral, wide-coverage, multi-lingual encyclopedia, or a repository of free media, etc., and then we choose means to those goals based on what we find works and doesn't work. We use wikis, for example, because they work better than Nupedia did, not because we love wikis; and we use consensus-based decision making because it seems to work better than the alternatives, not because we have some attachment to consensus-based political systems ([[en:WP:NOT]] has said as much for many years).
To some extent I agree with you. However:
- Quality (which encompasses many dimensions) may at first seem blatantly obvious, but it's quite clear that many similar knowledge collecting websites do _not_ emphasize quality, sometimes deliberately so to focus on collecting large amounts of factoids or uploads (think UrbanDictionary. YouTube). I'm not sure how much one can believe in quality as a "value", though.
- I do not believe that we should ever sacrifice friendliness "for the greater good". At the most, we should downgrade it to politeness, but we should never be impolite or unfriendly, and in fact build a community which strongly emphasizes this throughout its projects. (Mind you, I do not claim that I or anyone else can always live up to that goal, but I consider it a failing when we do not do so.) Anyone who has been on the Internet for a while knows that this idea is far from self-evident.
- "Participation" and "openness" are perhaps a bit shallow, but it seems clear that we are trying to empower the greatest number of people possible to make a positive contribution to free knowledge & free culture. We're not trying to empower idiots and trolls, of course. How could this goal of empowering _good_ contributors be phrased as a value?
I like the slogan "knowledge without boundaries" because it encompasses, in my view, this element of openness, while also describing a few other beliefs (the value of knowledge, the idea that everyone should have access to free education, and so forth).
- I liked the explanation of the word "pioneering" that the group gave which came up with it. We're not always the first to come up with a great feature, but we sure as hell are quick to integrate it if it's libre & useful.
- I do not much like "diversity" as a value and said as much during our discussions; it sounds too much like corporate-speak to me without really signifying much.