On Sat, 2006-06-05 at 03:43 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote: On 5/4/06, amgine@saewyc.net amgine@saewyc.net wrote:

...

The Foundation should (and did) describe the projects goals and missions, and approve any modifications of these.

Wikisource ("Project Sourceberg") was created before the Foundation even had a Board. This was during the time when new projects were essentially set up when something had to be dumped from Wikipedia. People were adding texts like national constitutions to Wikipedia verbatim. Hence, the only mission statement I've seen for Wikisource is on [[m:Wikisource]]:

"Mission: Allow people to handle primary sources better than currently, so that no one gets upset. Maybe that means provide a repository for primary sources; maybe that means figure out how to improve the Wikipedia interface for linking to outside repositories."

People get flamed nowadays for even submitting project proposals like this. You say I want to "dictate terms". But in actual fact, I want to be clear about what the project should _allow_, not so much about what it should _prohibit_. I do _not_ want a small group of a handful of people to retroactively create a definition that has never been written when it should have been. But that is exactly what will happen if you leave, for example, the question of whether to allow translations to the small, existing community of de.wikisource.org.

There are different scales of community involvement that are appropriate for different purposes. Even for an individual page, you may see cases where a group of editors is annoyed because someone else suddenly opens up a discussion without ever having worked on the page or having read past discussions.

However, nobody would argue that the people who have worked on a single Wikipedia article have some special "right" to make up their own policies -- because Wikipedia follows a particular philosophy, which, to a certain extent, is even shared across languages. Nobody, I hope, would seriously make the case that each language edition of Wikipedia should have a different logo symbol (as opposed to the subtitle). So these decisions are made on a project-wide level.

And in addition to the project level, there is the Wikimedia level. This includes involvement from the entire Wikimedia community, whether they have worked on a specific project or not. This is where we decide whether to launch a new projects. And in the case of old projects that did not go through this process, I think this is where the scope will have to be, gently and through a largely consultative process that of course involves the existing community, gradually defined or refined.

This has nothing to do with "dictating terms". Some see Wikimedia as a group of largely disparate tribes, others see it as a single community. It is, however, both. Some decisions are best made locally, some globally.

The ability to make global decisions, to arrive at a single definition for a project scope, to consistently enforce free content principles and NPOV, and so forth, is one of the reasons to have an organization like Wikimedia in the first place. The other key reason I can see is to build an ever larger community that is given ever more opportunities to do good. Both are negatively affected by excessive tribalism.

What else do we need Wikimedia for? Fundraising? The projects would probably be more effective in this regard if they could work independently, and besides, none is even remotely on the same scale as Wikipedia. Wikimedia without a Wikimedia community identity is a pointless entity.

I hope "Wikisourcerors" see themselves also as members of the larger Wikimedia community. I hope everyone who works on a Wikimedia project does.

Erik

That's an awfully long way to say we should ignore the last half of my sentence - "and approve modifications of these" - and instead have a top-down approach where changes come from outside and not from the inside.

Amgine