--- On Mon, 4/20/09, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:

From: Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Principle and pragmatism with nudity and sexual content To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Monday, April 20, 2009, 6:26 PM On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 10:18 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

2009/4/20 Birgitte SB birgitte_sb@yahoo.com:

...

I second this. Does anyone really believe it is

even possible to set one standard of what it means to be 'collegial' and 'collaborative' for all cultures? These things are not absolute values and each community needs to work out what standards are most pragmatic for it's members.

Well, we do have a few universal values shared across projects -- including those which were made concrete when community members hashed out the foundation mission and vision statements.  But it's not clear in which community it is appropriate to discuss those... [certainly many people are now expected to abide by the global standards set forth in the language of those statements who were active editors a few years ago and did not take part in the discussions about how to word them]

I didn't mean to imply there were no common standards or values for the mission of the projects.  But whether certain behaviors are perceived as 'collegial' and 'collaborative' or not is not some kind of cross-cultural value.  There is a big difference between the cross-cultural goals that we are trying accomplish in all projects and the most practical way to accomplish these common goals within each community.

...

There is no shortcut or appeal to authority that can

solve this for en.WP.  en.WP has to do the work and find these answers from within.

I didn't quite read PM's mail as an appeal to authority -- more as an appeal to "make more concrete decisions", by someone who is used to such decisions coming down from on high.  It is hard to be Bold and 'find answers from within' when that's not how you are used to problemsolving.

PM's mail included a bit on an attempt at an appeal to authority by way of Jimbo.

Birgitte SB