Hoi,
On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The request was voiced at a conference of language standards in Berlin (Dec 12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively support this effort. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
Just a few of the people who have expressed interest in working on a Wikistandards project run by Wikimedia:
* Professor Alan K. Melby, Brigham Young University, member of the Board of Directors and chair of the Translation and Computers committee, American Translators Association and many other affiliations, see http://www.ttt.org/akm-cv.html * Donald A. DePalma, President and CRO: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.; author: Business Without Borders, member of the Board of Directors of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), chair of the Language Standards for Global Business Summit, more: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/about_us/management.php?id=1 * Keiran Dunne, Assistant Professor of French, Pennsylvania State University * Dr. Jennifer DeCamp, principal engineer at MITRE Corporation, a federally funded Research and Development Center, where she provides software testing and advice on foreign language technology. She has worked with localization issues since the 1970s. * Peter Reynolds, Lionbridge Technologies, involved with the XLIFF and Translation Web Services standards. * Tex Texin, Internationalization Architect, Yahoo, Inc. Tex Texin has been providing globalization services including training, strategy, and implementation to the software industry for many years. See http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html for details.
The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate Wiktionary").
Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make use of content in our other projects.
One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies between the standards community and the Wikimedia community.
On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense. But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will make increased use of them in our projects.
On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project, supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation (CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and other meta data.
In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard process?
Given that we have a lot of enthusiasm for this project and given that it provides us with a win win situation, I do ask for your permission to set up this project in the very near future.
Thanks, GerardM
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The request was voiced at a conference of language standards in Berlin (Dec 12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively support this effort. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards Thanks, GerardM
Are these standards you would put on this new wiki anything to do with a manual of style or writing guidelines?
I also have to ask - is a wiki really the best format for documenting standards? A standard is supposed to be an immutable document; it can't just be edited and changed by anyone because that's going to ruin compatibility.
Chris
Chris Jenkinson wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived.
Thanks, GerardM
Are these standards you would put on this new wiki anything to do with a manual of style or writing guidelines?
I also have to ask - is a wiki really the best format for documenting standards? A standard is supposed to be an immutable document; it can't just be edited and changed by anyone because that's going to ruin compatibility.
Chris
I believe that a wiki is an excellent method of collaborative writing, including standards development. Often when trying to develop a standard you need to work on several parts of the standard simultaneously, and having revision control and other feedback methods found on MediaWiki software is going to be very useful.
As far as making a standard immutable, we already have page protection once the standard has been put in place. This is no different than Wikisource where similar kinds of immutable documents already exist. That would have to be a community decision as to if a certain page has a "final" status and can't be changed any more.
More likely, you would have to have some sort of versioning of documents anyway, where you would have a "frozen" official version and a draft version that is still a work in progress. We already have date versioning in MediaWiki software anyway, so this is something that doesn't even need extra development.
As far as a style guide, there are several current ISO related guidelines that could be adapted for use by anybody trying to write standards documentation of any sort. This isn't even new for Wikimedia projects either.
I want to add that there is a huge need for open and free (as in speech as well as beer) standards. Even modestly priced standards from groups like ANSI or ISO can cost more than $200 a piece, and I've seen some fairly general standards documents costing more than $100,000 each with some incredibly draconian non-disclosure agreements. Even supposedly public standards like the National Electrical Code that governs how buildings are wired with electricity can cost a couple thousand dollars... and that is a matter of law that you have to live by.
This is something that really needs to be established, and I feel it would be an excellent candidate for the seed wiki (under whatever name that might be officially called if it get going). There isn't quite the same level of support for this as say Wikiversity, but I think we could get a strong community going for this.
This really can't be accomodated in Wikibooks directly in part because this isn't really teaching materials or textbook development, and the standards development process needs some additional community support that simply can't be directly accomodated by Wikibooks. New policies and social structures need to be developed that are specific and unique to the development of standards documentation. Most of that can be developed ad hoc once the project is developed.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I believe that a wiki is an excellent method of collaborative writing, including standards development. Often when trying to develop a standard you need to work on several parts of the standard simultaneously, and having revision control and other feedback methods found on MediaWiki software is going to be very useful.
As far as making a standard immutable, we already have page protection once the standard has been put in place. This is no different than Wikisource where similar kinds of immutable documents already exist. That would have to be a community decision as to if a certain page has a "final" status and can't be changed any more.
More likely, you would have to have some sort of versioning of documents anyway, where you would have a "frozen" official version and a draft version that is still a work in progress. We already have date versioning in MediaWiki software anyway, so this is something that doesn't even need extra development.
That's a fair point, thanks for the explanation.
Chris
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I want to add that there is a huge need for open and free (as in speech as well as beer) standards. Even modestly priced standards from groups like ANSI or ISO can cost more than $200 a piece, and I've seen some fairly general standards documents costing more than $100,000 each with some incredibly draconian non-disclosure agreements. Even supposedly public standards like the National Electrical Code that governs how buildings are wired with electricity can cost a couple thousand dollars... and that is a matter of law that you have to live by.
To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly in the United States. When the United States ratifies a treaty it means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of the United States. Since US laws are excluded from copyright we should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted into Wikisource.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly in the United States. When the United States ratifies a treaty it means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of the United States. Since US laws are excluded from copyright we should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted into Wikisource.
Generally they aren't adopted verbatim into law---instead the law references the standards, which still remain under copyright. For example, the law will include a phrase like "for devices in compliance with ISO standard xxxxx", but will not actually include the text of said standard.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly in the United States. When the United States ratifies a treaty it means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of the United States. Since US laws are excluded from copyright we should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted into Wikisource.
Generally they aren't adopted verbatim into law---instead the law references the standards, which still remain under copyright. For example, the law will include a phrase like "for devices in compliance with ISO standard xxxxx", but will not actually include the text of said standard.
Such a phrase would make them a part of the law by implication, and thus not protected. Of course, before using any one of them we would need to make sure that the US has in fact adopted that standard.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I want to add that there is a huge need for open and free (as in speech as well as beer) standards. Even modestly priced standards from groups like ANSI or ISO can cost more than $200 a piece, and I've seen some fairly general standards documents costing more than $100,000 each with some incredibly draconian non-disclosure agreements. Even supposedly public standards like the National Electrical Code that governs how buildings are wired with electricity can cost a couple thousand dollars... and that is a matter of law that you have to live by.
To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly in the United States. When the United States ratifies a treaty it means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of the United States. Since US laws are excluded from copyright we should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted into Wikisource.
Ec
Treaties are one thing, but I'm also talking civil code that is passed by legislative bodies, including the U.S. Congress. The National Electrical Code in particular has been adopted almost completely by several state legislatures in the USA and all construction that takes place in those states, by law, must conform to that standard as a result. What is interesting about this particular set of codes is that the body who wrote the standard is still claiming copyright status over the text of the code, dispite the fact that they have lobbied for and won formal legislative approval for the code by governmental bodies. The actual copyright status is unclear at the moment and subject to legal wrangling, and is going through the court system right now where some people are suing precisely because it is felt that actual laws that we live under should be made available in the public domain. Because of the murky legal status at the moment, I would recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation and sister projects stay away from standards like this at the moment. Still, I'm giving this as an example of a standard that should be free, and had it been available in a copyleft license instead of a propritary license by a bunch of people trying to make some quick money, the whole legal mess could have been avoided.
The justification for charging anything for standards at all usually breaks down into the following arguments:
1) The physical media that the standards are printed on isn't cheap, including web servers to host the content. 2) Standards development costs money to develop, including dealing with staff members who have to help organize and maintain the standards documents for long after the development has been completed, and organizing conferences that get the standards committee members together. 3) Some industries want to put a higher bar up for people trying to implement the standards, and if you can put up $100,000 for a standard document, you are likely to have some serious additional money to get a business going that would use the standard.
Of these arguments, I really only support the first one, and that is an issue that the Wikimedia Foundation deals with all of the time anyway. This proposal is to have the organization of the standards take place in virtual space, so there is no need to put up a standing committee in 4-star hotels, car rentals, plane tickets, and all of the rest of the expenses that happen with trying to get a group of people physically brought together. That by itself will substantially reduce the costs of standards development. If a group still wants to physically get together at a place like Wikimania, they can but it must be done at their own expense and is independent of the development of the standard itself.
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Robert Scott Horning wrote:
I want to add that there is a huge need for open and free (as in speech as well as beer) standards. Even modestly priced standards from groups like ANSI or ISO can cost more than $200 a piece, and I've seen some fairly general standards documents costing more than $100,000 each with some incredibly draconian non-disclosure agreements. Even supposedly public standards like the National Electrical Code that governs how buildings are wired with electricity can cost a couple thousand dollars... and that is a matter of law that you have to live by.
To what extent do these standards have the force of law, particularly in the United States. When the United States ratifies a treaty it means that it has effectively made that treaty a part of the law of the United States. Since US laws are excluded from copyright we should be free to include the standards that have been so adopted into Wikisource.
Ec
Treaties are one thing, but I'm also talking civil code that is passed by legislative bodies, including the U.S. Congress. The National Electrical Code in particular has been adopted almost completely by several state legislatures in the USA and all construction that takes place in those states, by law, must conform to that standard as a result. What is interesting about this particular set of codes is that the body who wrote the standard is still claiming copyright status over the text of the code, dispite the fact that they have lobbied for and won formal legislative approval for the code by governmental bodies. The actual copyright status is unclear at the moment and subject to legal wrangling, and is going through the court system right now where some people are suing precisely because it is felt that actual laws that we live under should be made available in the public domain. Because of the murky legal status at the moment, I would recommend that the Wikimedia Foundation and sister projects stay away from standards like this at the moment. Still, I'm giving this as an example of a standard that should be free, and had it been available in a copyleft license instead of a propritary license by a bunch of people trying to make some quick money, the whole legal mess could have been avoided.
The justification for charging anything for standards at all usually breaks down into the following arguments:
- The physical media that the standards are printed on isn't cheap,
including web servers to host the content. 2) Standards development costs money to develop, including dealing with staff members who have to help organize and maintain the standards documents for long after the development has been completed, and organizing conferences that get the standards committee members together. 3) Some industries want to put a higher bar up for people trying to implement the standards, and if you can put up $100,000 for a standard document, you are likely to have some serious additional money to get a business going that would use the standard.
Of these arguments, I really only support the first one, and that is an issue that the Wikimedia Foundation deals with all of the time anyway. This proposal is to have the organization of the standards take place in virtual space, so there is no need to put up a standing committee in 4-star hotels, car rentals, plane tickets, and all of the rest of the expenses that happen with trying to get a group of people physically brought together. That by itself will substantially reduce the costs of standards development. If a group still wants to physically get together at a place like Wikimania, they can but it must be done at their own expense and is independent of the development of the standard itself.
Hoi, There was an organisation in the USA that had to do with building regulations. They claimed copyright to their document including the document that passed into law. This organisation lost its right to claim restrictions to the document that became law in a court case. There is this thing called precedence.
From you argument, I understand that because something is not to your liking, we should not be interested. We should not be interested even thought it is the very people who are asking for this wiki, who are the ones that are involved into the standards process ?? Yes, there are some people who think it makes sense to ask for payment to get a copy of a standards document. There are also some people who take the complete opposite position. If anything, I would think from your arguments that you would support the people who are arguing for more open access to standards.
Why you mention Wikimania is beyond me .. then again thinking of Wikimania as a conference where standards are set has some appeal :)
Thanks, GerardM
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, From you argument, I understand that because something is not to your liking, we should not be interested. We should not be interested even thought it is the very people who are asking for this wiki, who are the ones that are involved into the standards process ?? Yes, there are some people who think it makes sense to ask for payment to get a copy of a standards document. There are also some people who take the complete opposite position. If anything, I would think from your arguments that you would support the people who are arguing for more open access to standards.
Why you mention Wikimania is beyond me .. then again thinking of Wikimania as a conference where standards are set has some appeal :)
Thanks, GerardM
I am trying to support open and free standards. I'm sorry if language issues got in the way of that.
Re: Wikimania... having a break-out group that can discuss standards setting and this project is a really good idea. I was just trying to use Wikimania as an example of a conference that can be used for the setting of standards, as have other conferences that I've attended in the past for other purposes. I was also trying to show how sometimes the cost of the conference is sometimes put into the price of the standard that results from the conference, and that is something the Wikistandards proposal is not going to do, at least directly.
On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 07:38:13AM -0700, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote a message of 77 lines which said:
I want to add that there is a huge need for open and free (as in speech as well as beer) standards. Even modestly priced standards from groups like ANSI or ISO can cost more than $200 a piece,
[First, let's talk about free beer]
Not all SDOs (Standard Definition Organizations) charge for the access to standards. World-Wide Web consortium (http://www.w3.org/), Oasis (http://www.oasis-open.org/) and of course the IETF (http://www.ietf.org/), which launched the trend, do not.
[Now, free speech]
I know what is free [as in free speech] software and there are written definitions of it. I do not know yet what is a free [as in free speech] standard. The IETF is busy discussing it (in its IPR working group). Advices are welcome, and so are attemps to put down in writing the Definition of Free Standard (once you'll try to do it, you may discover that it is not so obvious).
Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
I know what is free [as in free speech] software and there are written definitions of it. I do not know yet what is a free [as in free speech] standard. The IETF is busy discussing it (in its IPR working group). Advices are welcome, and so are attemps to put down in writing the Definition of Free Standard (once you'll try to do it, you may discover that it is not so obvious).
Standards should be public domain, for the same reason that the Human Genome is public domain. There's a short section in Sir John Sulston's autobiography "The Common Thread" as to why the public domain is more suitable than "copyleft" licences for this.
Chris
Hi everyone interested in wiki standards:
If you are talking about technical standards (wiki markup, interlinking, interchange, etc.):
At WikiSym 2005 (www.wikisym.org) many of the Wiki engine implementors met (including Brion Vibber) to tackle the issue of standardizing wiki protocols once more. (Attempts have been there for ages, but with limited progress.)
Previous attempts were made on a couple of independent sites, including Ward's Wiki, Meatball, CommunityWiki. None of these sites was really representative of the whole community, so we decided to have a new attempt supported by WikiSym and its community, i.e. a mailing list (http://www.wikisym.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/wiki-standards) and a wiki (http://wiki.wikisym.org). The mailing list is working, the wiki (a MediaWiki installation) has been dormant so far as we are gearing up only now. Also, we don't really require that the standards writing process takes place on one particular wiki---rather we felt it was ok if people do stuff on their own site (or consolidate what's already there) and the submit it for community review and approval.
To the extent that you are talking about general technical standards rather than Wikimedia Foundation site standards, and you would like to ensure that wiki engine implementors are included, I would like to make the case that a new organization like WikiSym may be a better place than a WMF site. (More on that if you are in fact talking about technical standards.)
In any case, I invite everyone to look at the WikiSym site. WikiSym 2006 will take place in Denmark in August and will be co-located with ACM Hypertext 2006 and sponsored by ACM SIGWEB. CfP will be out real soon now :-)
Dirk
---- Dirk Riehle, ph: +49 172 184 8755, web: http:/www.riehle.org Interested in wiki research? Please see http://www.wikisym.org! Take a Geek's Tour of the Silicon Valley! http://www.ageekstour.com
At 07.01.2006, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The request was voiced at a conference of language standards in Berlin (Dec 12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively support this effort. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
Just a few of the people who have expressed interest in working on a Wikistandards project run by Wikimedia:
- Professor Alan K. Melby, Brigham Young University, member of the Board
of Directors and chair of the Translation and Computers committee, American Translators Association and many other affiliations, see http://www.ttt.org/akm-cv.html
- Donald A. DePalma, President and CRO: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.;
author: Business Without Borders, member of the Board of Directors of the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), chair of the Language Standards for Global Business Summit, more: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/about_us/management.php?id=1
- Keiran Dunne, Assistant Professor of French, Pennsylvania State
University * Dr. Jennifer DeCamp, principal engineer at MITRE Corporation, a federally funded Research and Development Center, where she provides software testing and advice on foreign language technology. She has worked with localization issues since the 1970s.
- Peter Reynolds, Lionbridge Technologies, involved with the XLIFF and
Translation Web Services standards.
- Tex Texin, Internationalization Architect, Yahoo, Inc. Tex Texin has
been providing globalization services including training, strategy, and implementation to the software industry for many years. See http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html for details.
The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate Wiktionary").
Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make use of content in our other projects.
One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies between the standards community and the Wikimedia community.
On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense. But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will make increased use of them in our projects.
On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project, supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation (CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and other meta data.
In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard process?
Given that we have a lot of enthusiasm for this project and given that it provides us with a win win situation, I do ask for your permission to set up this project in the very near future.
Thanks, GerardM
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The request was voiced at a conference of language standards in Berlin (Dec 12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively support this effort. See: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
I can't say that I would oppose this as a separate project. Clearly the need to have relatively firm and uneditable versions is much stronger than in any of our existing projects. Other discussions have already pointed to the need for versions of Wikipedia articles that are marked reliable.
The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate Wiktionary").
The drift of Wiktionary2 into this kind of thing seems somehow less threatening to the future of the existing Wiktionaries which would continue to be real wikis.
Involving oursekves in standards cretion has a deliciously subversive ring to it. If standards can be established through some kind of broad global collaboration it's one less thing for governmens to be doing. As I've stated before after the negative votes from France and Holland a wiki would be an excellent vehicle for rewriting the EU Constitution. ... perhaps even a world constitution.
Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make use of content in our other projects.
Fair enough.
One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies between the standards community and the Wikimedia community.
I'm sure there are vested interests that will object strongly to having their gravy trains derailed.
On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense. But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will make increased use of them in our projects.
Not necessarily.
On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project, supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation (CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and other meta data.
Although these standards may already be established, putting them into Wikistandards would open them to discussion, and possibly amendment. Absolutely nothing should be considered sacred, but that should not imply that any existing standard should be immediately thrown into chaos. When it comes to its own internal policies Wikipedia is a model of chaos. It often seems that the process is dominated by a few who have an interest in promulgating a particular policy then protecting it once that is accomplished. The entire decision-making process needs to be reviewed.
In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard process?
I suppose that a conceivable extension of Jimbo's Frankfurt speech would be, "Free the standards."
Ec
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org