2010/5/9 Andreas Kolbe jayen466@yahoo.com: (..)
For me, this statement is at the first line a support for Jimmy's effort. It is a soft push from the board to the community to move in a direction. Both Jimmy as well as me believe that the best way for the board to do things is to give guidance to the communities. But, this topic is already pending for years. Looking back into the archives of foundation-l or village pump of Commons there were enough discussions. If the problem cannot be solved inside of the community, it is my believe it is the duty of the board and every board member to solve the problem.
Ting
I see no indication so far that the community *is* able to solve the problem.
Sorry, I have never posted here, but I feel so sad reading such words... and other words spoken here at foundation-l.. the projects under the umbrella of WMF are so beautiful, so precious, to be treated this way... =~~~~
But well, so that's the reason Jimmy Wales must be so authoritarian? Because the Community of Commons can't solve this issue through consensus?
Is solving this particular issue really more important than reaching consensus? Why?
Are you a member of the Board of Trustees or something? Could you inform me if the whole board has this kind of position?
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board of Trustees? They are serving the interests of who? And who can revoke the trust upon a specific trustee, or the entire board, in the event it was misused?
Please don't say "the community".
PS: I may look inquisitive, but I see this anti-porn campaign contrasting to the complete lack of action when it was found that wiki-en was grossly offending Islam for no better reason. I must cite this post:
2010/5/7 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com: (..)
Did you see what Jimmy deleted? For example, Franz von Bayros painting [1]. That guy is not so famous, but I don't see anymore any sane rule, except: What Jimmy's sexually impaired super rich friend wish, Jimmy do and then Board transform into the rule or a statement.
Besides the fact that he was dealing just with Western taboos of naked body and sexual act, not with Mohamed cartoons [2] at English Wikipedia, where he is the God King.
If the Board stays behind such action, this is a very clear signal that Wikimedia projects are becoming censored. And if Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons won't be deleted, then Wikimedia projects are a tool of Western cultural imperialism.
I want to hear other Board members before making my decision about staying here.
Since Jimmy is "special", for some reason, and his actions will not face the consequences that is expected for common editors, admins, bureaucrats, etc. I must say that images of Muhammad is not being deleted *just because Jimmy is not Muslim*.
Hello Elias,
Welcome to the mailing list.
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 1:25 AM, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva tolkiendili@gmail.com wrote:
2010/5/9 Andreas Kolbe jayen466@yahoo.com: (..)
board to do things is to give guidance to the communities. But, this topic is already pending for years. Looking back into the archives of foundation-l or village pump of Commons there were enough discussions. If the problem cannot be solved inside of the community, it is my believe it is the duty of the board and every board member to solve the problem.
Ting
I see no indication so far that the community *is* able to solve the problem.
Sorry, I have never posted here, but I feel so sad reading such words... and other words spoken here at foundation-l.. the projects under the umbrella of WMF are so beautiful, so precious, to be treated this way... =~~~~
Thank you for your kind words for the projects.
But well, so that's the reason Jimmy Wales must be so authoritarian? Because the Community of Commons can't solve this issue through consensus?
Is solving this particular issue really more important than reaching consensus? Why?
It seems to me the only way a project can work through this sort of complex issue is through careful consensus and decision-making.
I do not think solving it somehow is more important than reaching consensus, or a decision that everyone can live with. Questions of how to deal with highly controversial content -- from images of Muhammad to private personal information to explicit images of sex -- are often difficult to solve.
This may be the sort of complex decision that would benefit from a community-run advisory or policy group, with representatives from many projects. Such decision making can take many months, and needs slow but persistent attention and progress towards a balanced resolution. [often our current practices of wiki-based decision making simply lose steam after an initial burst of interest, and future iterations on the theme have to start over from scratch.]
Are you a member of the Board of Trustees or something? Could you inform me if the whole board has this kind of position?
No, the whole Board does not have this position. (not to speak for others -- I am on it, and I am opposed to the idea.)
This is out of scope for the Board, which like the Foundation itself generally stays out of content creation, policy-making, and governance of the individual Projects.
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board of Trustees? They are serving the interests of who? And who can revoke the trust upon a specific trustee, or the entire board, in the event it was misused?
The Board governs the Foundation to support the interests of the mission and the needs of the Projects.
In an emergency, the Board itself could remove a Trustee; in practice there are elections and appointments each year. Of our ten trustees, there are six 'community trustees': three elected by the editing community every two years, two selected by the national Chapters every [other] two years, and Jimmy as founding trustee, reappointed each year. The other four trustees are appointed each year by the community trustees.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_board_manual http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_member
PS: I may look inquisitive, but I see this anti-porn campaign contrasting to the complete lack of action when it was found that wiki-en was grossly offending Islam for no better reason.
I agree that the issue of images of Muhammad is similar to that of explicit sexual content -- both are highly controversial, considered by some to be educational or important; and by others to be useless and offensive. We must find a way to deal evenly with all controversial material, and to understand the perspectives of different audiences.
SJ
2010/5/10 Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com:
Hello Elias,
Welcome to the mailing list.
Hi! ^^
Are you a member of the Board of Trustees or something? Could you inform me if the whole board has this kind of position?
No, the whole Board does not have this position. (not to speak for others -- I am on it, and I am opposed to the idea.)
Yours response, as well as Florence's, was refreshing.
I am actually embarrassed, since most of my comment wasn't very constructive. (My comments on commons were even less balanced, but I was really upset)
PS: I may look inquisitive, but I see this anti-porn campaign contrasting to the complete lack of action when it was found that wiki-en was grossly offending Islam for no better reason.
I agree that the issue of images of Muhammad is similar to that of explicit sexual content -- both are highly controversial, considered by some to be educational or important; and by others to be useless and offensive. We must find a way to deal evenly with all controversial material, and to understand the perspectives of different audiences.
I have no idea on how to deal with so many different expectations. I myself always praised the position of some WMF projects regarding showing human body, nudity in general and even and pornography. I don't know much encyclopedias that show specific parts of human body as they are, and as well as Wikipedia.
(I remember a single biology book of my high school with photos of nude people - but it was mostly drawings. Plus, hmm, a really nice History book with a nude painting on the cover, and that's it)
Looking at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&offset=201005...
I see that Jimmy deleted this image:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amy_with_dildo.jpg
With the rationale 'Out of project scope'
But it was restored, because it was being actually used on dutch Wikipedia, on the article "Amateur porn"
http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateurpornografie
So my conclusion is: amateur porn might be on topic on commons. And currently unused amateur porn might find some use later.z
This state of affairs makes me feel really well. Wikipedia is a unique encyclopedia in many ways. One of them is that it has illustrated articles on amateur porn. No, people don't care, that's fine - but this really means a lot for me. In my country, 100 years ago, there were a revolt, called "vaccine revolt", where people rebelled against compulsory vaccination. It was the greatest urban revolt of the old republic[1]. A particular argument used by the rebels was that doctors was entering to woman's houses, and had to see the naked arm of them, even the naked arm of girls, so that they could handle vaccination. I don't support compulsory vaccination, but this kind of reasoning really shocks me. It is now a distant past. Brazil is not like that anymore, and fortunately we now have schoolbooks with naked people on the cover (as I remembered).
I sincerely don't personally care much about Muhammad pictures, for example. If people decided to delete them, I would simply think they are too afraid of offending, but I wouldn't care that much. (I know that being very notable and encyclopedic, the pictures themselves might have their own article, so it's not like they are going to be deleted anyway)
But some people (Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali) would be harshly offended by deletion of those pictures. It might sound funny, but not accepting Islam rules on non-muslim contexts is very important to her (being a vocal ex-muslim, she received multiple death threats, and the director of a short documentary her wrote was killed). I would show opposition to this kind of deletion, but just because I'm a lot influenced by her (and dislike deletionism in general)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_Revolt
2010/5/10 Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva tolkiendili@gmail.com:
I sincerely don't personally care much about Muhammad pictures, for example. If people decided to delete them, I would simply think they are too afraid of offending, but I wouldn't care that much. (I know that being very notable and encyclopedic, the pictures themselves might have their own article, so it's not like they are going to be deleted anyway)
But some people (Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali) would be harshly offended by deletion of those pictures. It might sound funny, but not accepting Islam rules on non-muslim contexts is very important to her (being a vocal ex-muslim, she received multiple death threats, and the director of a short documentary her wrote was killed). I would show opposition to this kind of deletion, but just because I'm a lot influenced by her (and dislike deletionism in general)
This was maybe confuse. The message I was trying to convey is:
a) For some people including nudity (in especial en masse) is offensive b) For some people including depictions of Muhammad is offensive c) For some people removing nudity (in especial en masse) is offensive (eg. me :) d) For some people removing depictions of Muhammad is offensive (eg. for Ayaan)
On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote:
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board of Trustees?
Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed.
We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source software stack and its free content license.
They are serving the interests of who? And who can revoke the trust upon a specific trustee, or the entire board, in the event it was misused?
As a non-membership non-profit corporation, federal law dictates that it must have a Board and that the Board has final responsibility.
The Articles of Incorporation could have specified means for oversight of the Board, say by the community, but this was not done. They simply say that the Board will make its own rules for how its members are replaced.
The law gives us some protection, in that it prevents Board members from running the Foundation for their own personal gain (aside from reasonable salaries and expenses). However, it's still very important that we pick Board members carefully when we have community elections, and that we encourage the existing Board to make good choices for appointments.
-- Tim Starling
Tim Starling hett schreven:
On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote:
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board of Trustees?
Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed.
We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source software stack and its free content license.
If Wikipedia wouldn't have been so free today it would stand where Citizendium stands and another free encyclopedia project would have evolved in place. Wikipedia wasn't the only community-driven encyclopedia project. But it made the race and beat all its competitors cause no other project was as free and easily accessible as Wikipedia.
Marcus Buck User:Slomox
On 05/10/2010 03:11 AM, Tim Starling wrote:
On 10/05/10 15:25, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva wrote:
BTW, I also have a broader question. Who entrusted power to the Board of Trustees?
Jimmy Wales determined the structure of the Wikimedia Foundation when he created it. He and Bomis donated the relevant assets, such as the domain names, to the Foundation at the time it was formed.
We should remember, when we criticise his use of whatever remnant of power that he has left, that he could have easily structured Wikimedia as a for-profit entity, with him retaining majority control. We have Jimmy to thank for Wikimedia's non-profit status, its open-source software stack and its free content license.
That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles recruiting volunteers. You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia that their efforts would be redundant?
In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a project with no contributors.
-Mark
On 10/05/10 20:51, Delirium wrote:
That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles recruiting volunteers.
Perhaps, but the lack of a free license didn't stop IMDB or Yahoo Answers, did it?
You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia that their efforts would be redundant?
No, I remember that GNUpedia was a tiny non-wiki encyclopedia project, I don't remember it gearing up to be a competitor.
But I'll admit that the content license was the most essential to Wikipedia's success of the three elements I'm talking about. I think the case is much stronger that it could have succeeded with a for-profit stance, and with a closed-source software stack.
Even the bulk of the open-source community doesn't mind contributing to websites that run on a closed-source stack, look at Sourceforge or GitHub. And for-profit organisations which commercialise community-developed open-source projects have become the norm.
In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a project with no contributors.
Wikipedia collected thousands of articles while it had an FAQ that read:
"Q. Why is wikipedia.org redirected to wikipedia.com and not the other way around?"
"A. I'm afraid it's for precisely the reason you fear: the people who are organizing this view it partly, from their point of view, as a business. They hope to recoup their costs, at the very least (certain Wikipedia members are actually paid to help!)--by placing unobtrusive ads, someday in the possibly-distant future. It would, thus, be dishonest of them to use .org. Of course, if you don't like this, it will be possible to export all the contents of Wikipedia for use elsewhere, since the contents of Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License."
It's complete nonsense to claim that with a for-profit stance, Wikipedia would have been "more pitiful than Citizendium". It was bigger than Citizendium while it *had* a for-profit stance.
Of course some contributors would have left, that's partly my point. The policies Jimmy imposed on Wikipedia caused an accumulation of like-minded people, and that's why Wikipedia's culture today is what it is.
-- Tim Starling
thousands, yes. Even conservapedia has thousands. But millions?
I have no objection to working for a profit making enterprise. But when I do, I want my share of the money.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 7:48 PM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10/05/10 20:51, Delirium wrote:
That isn't really true, though. He recruited volunteers with the promise of the free-content license for sure, and with a sort of implicit promise of a generally free-culture / volunteer-run encyclopedia. If he had *not* promised anything, he would have had many more troubles recruiting volunteers.
Perhaps, but the lack of a free license didn't stop IMDB or Yahoo Answers, did it?
You do remember that GNUpedia was gearing up to serve as a competitor, and only backed down because Jimmy gave them enough assurances that Wikipedia was such a free-culture encyclopedia that their efforts would be redundant?
No, I remember that GNUpedia was a tiny non-wiki encyclopedia project, I don't remember it gearing up to be a competitor.
But I'll admit that the content license was the most essential to Wikipedia's success of the three elements I'm talking about. I think the case is much stronger that it could have succeeded with a for-profit stance, and with a closed-source software stack.
Even the bulk of the open-source community doesn't mind contributing to websites that run on a closed-source stack, look at Sourceforge or GitHub. And for-profit organisations which commercialise community-developed open-source projects have become the norm.
In short, Jimmy could not have gone the for-profit or non-free-culture route, because he would have been left more pitiful than Citizendium: a project with no contributors.
Wikipedia collected thousands of articles while it had an FAQ that read:
"Q. Why is wikipedia.org redirected to wikipedia.com and not the other way around?"
"A. I'm afraid it's for precisely the reason you fear: the people who are organizing this view it partly, from their point of view, as a business. They hope to recoup their costs, at the very least (certain Wikipedia members are actually paid to help!)--by placing unobtrusive ads, someday in the possibly-distant future. It would, thus, be dishonest of them to use .org. Of course, if you don't like this, it will be possible to export all the contents of Wikipedia for use elsewhere, since the contents of Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License."
It's complete nonsense to claim that with a for-profit stance, Wikipedia would have been "more pitiful than Citizendium". It was bigger than Citizendium while it *had* a for-profit stance.
Of course some contributors would have left, that's partly my point. The policies Jimmy imposed on Wikipedia caused an accumulation of like-minded people, and that's why Wikipedia's culture today is what it is.
-- Tim Starling
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On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 2:31 AM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
thousands, yes. Even conservapedia has thousands. But millions?
I have no objection to working for a profit making enterprise. But when I do, I want my share of the money.
I imagine Wikia has millions of articles, all told. Gaia Online http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/ has more than 1.7 *billion* posts. Facebook and YouTube both get user-contributed content on comparable or greater scales than Wikipedia. Sure, they have lower quality standards and you have to scale down the quantity accordingly for a fair comparison, but that doesn't defeat the point. All are run by for-profit corporations, and nobody cares. They contribute for their own reasons, and view the ads as a necessary burden.
Open-source software is another good comparison. Many of the biggest projects are controlled by businesses, which profit off them extensively. But nobody minds, not even Richard Stallman. People are just as happy to be Ubuntu or Fedora maintainers as Debian maintainers. They don't ask for a cut of the money, because they know the business is reinvesting the profit in the project itself.
Basically, all of Web 2.0 is built on user contributions, but Wikipedia is the *only* major not-for-profit site out there. Every other very large site is for-profit. This suggests Wikipedia's not-for-profit status is a fluke, not an inevitability. People participate in these sites mainly for fun, status, or personal gain, not high-minded idealism. The number of Wikipedians who have convinced themselves otherwise only demonstrates how eager people are to believe in their own nobility.
Tim Starling wrote:
They are serving the interests of who? And who can revoke the trust upon a specific trustee, or the entire board, in the event it was misused?
As a non-membership non-profit corporation, federal law dictates that it must have a Board and that the Board has final responsibility.
The Articles of Incorporation could have specified means for oversight of the Board, say by the community, but this was not done. They simply say that the Board will make its own rules for how its members are replaced.
Yes, this is how it is organizationally. The white elephant in the room though is that this is all pretty academic because of the fact that Wikimedia projects operate under a Free Licence.
What ever the legal situation is organizationally, it is very near suicidal for the foundation to have any larger disconnect with the community than which happened just recently. It would only be an act of self-preservation for the Board of Trustees to seek to find ways to decisively prevent a recurrence.
As per Jimbos instruction to look to the future than the past, I would suggest that the Board look post-haste into instituting some form of institution that can offer (perhaps under a similar confidentiality agreement that the board itself operates under) constructive advice in a timely manner (rather than after the fact), when it deliberates which direction the Board of Trustees wants to take things.
My suggestion would be that as a first, rudimentary step, such a Community Advisory Group consist of one person of known communicative ability and insight (as determined by the Board of Trustees themselves) from each Project, when feasible representing more than one language in the overall distribution. That is to say, one person each, from Wikipedias, Commons, Wikinews projects, Wikiquote projects, Wikibooks projects, Wiktionaries, Wikiversities, the Wikispecies, Wikisource. Assuming I haven't forgotten any projects, that would make a nine member group.
The law gives us some protection, in that it prevents Board members from running the Foundation for their own personal gain (aside from reasonable salaries and expenses). However, it's still very important that we pick Board members carefully when we have community elections, and that we encourage the existing Board to make good choices for appointments.
This is of course indisputable.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org