In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific
Daylight Time,
fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net writes:
Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging
to a nonprofit
corporation. If the United States government, or some other government,
owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access
it
would be a public website.
My point Fred, is there is no such animal. So calling something a
"private
website" is redundant, since all websites are private, there are no
public
websites. Certainly there are websites owned by governments, but they
are
not public in the sense above that there is guaranteed access to *modify*
their contents.
There are public spaces which are enforced, for example, freedom of
religion or of the press in the United States. But you are correct that
words alone fail; such guarantees must be enforced by citizens with a
commitment to them. But that is not fundamentally different from how
Wikipedia, or any voluntary organization, works.
Fred