Anthere wrote:
Erik Moeller wrote:
On 11/17/06, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
OK... except that Erik specifically stated that these mission and vision statements would be the things cited in explaining why WMF would or would not support WikiFoo.
Only in a very broad and general way. We want to be careful not to exclude too much a priori. But I am personally very much in favor of using the word "Knowledge" in the Mission & Vision statements, because it is, depending on how we interpret it (and we can argue for an interpretation based on the existing projects), already a fairly good limitation of scope. Florence has now objected to this word in the unstable Mission Statement and replaced it with "content". I still haven't seen an adequate explanation why "knowledge" should not be used.
I answered here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mission/Unstable#knowledge_under_a_free_...
I have not *now* objected to the use of the word knowledge in the mission statement. This objection has been raised during the board retreat, left unsolved at the end of it, and was actually listed as the things for which no agreement was reached. So, this objection is now nearly a month old.
One of the arguments you used against the word "content" is that Stallman did not like the use of this word. I object to the word knowledge, because I do not think this is what we are doing. We seek to have all human being knowledgeable (that's definitly our vision), but knowledge is an unpalpable concept. And we are doing something very palpable. One of the relevant argument against the use of this word is that "knowledge" can not be copyrighted, so producing freely-licenced knowledge makes no sense. My most compelling argument is that "knowledge" is something personnal. Something different for each person.
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Agree with all of that. The problem is that when you talk about "knowledge" you have to add the disclaimer "not in the biblical sense", and that if it's "information" we've got, hello Wikistalk...