Jimmy Wales wrote:
And what Delirium is talking about is how we care about the _free_ encyclopedia (emphasizing gnu-freedom) more than we care about our crazy open wiki way of making it.
I think everyone in the core community is on board with those two concepts in a major way. And all of us love the wiki ways, but not at the expense of those two goals.
Yes, perhaps so. I may have misread, but I read mav as suggesting that the reason we are a gnu-free encyclopedia is as a practical means-to-an-end matter: We want to create an encyclopedia that reaches everyone, and this helps us do it. I disagree with that view---*even* if there were some way to create a non-Free encyclopedia that allowed the Wikimedia Foundation to give it to everyone on the planet (but restricted what others could do with it), I would still want to work on a Free encyclopedia project that allows anyone to use it for essentially any purpose (and it's not all that farfetched a scenario---Wikipedia could probably have still attracted a lot of contributors under some non-Free license, like one that restricted 3rd-party use to non-commercial and academic/educational users; in fact some people have actually been surprised and/or upset that we *do* permit 3rd-party commercial use).
Basically, in a sort of big-picture sense, I see Wikipedia as a project to give to humanity as a whole an unencumbered body of work. Everything else sort of follows naturally from that, because once it exists, people *will* find plenty of interesting things to do with it (just look at all the interesting ways Project Gutenberg texts are used).
-Mark