Hoi!
Hoi!
Yes... it's a damn complicated problem. I'm preparing a blog on the subject.
I have no direct knowledge of the situation in Ro.wiki, but many things
happening in the Cyrillic space show the same trend. I'd venture in saying
that many post-communist wikies share a similar structure.
In short, judging them as "not adequate" from a standard western POV is
easy, yet we have to evaluate a number of real life situations:
1) what kind of information natives are exposed to (this is a very serious
issue in Eastern Europe)
2) what kind of education they get in school
3) what alternative sources they may have to reach some encyclopedia-like
behaviour
We cannot judge ro.wiki (or ukr.wiki) with the same standards we use for
en.wiki, because the books available here are quite different from those you
can buy in Oxford and local TV channels say what they say. There are
objective reasons behind this apparent madness and we are going to meet
similar problems more and more often as we move further away from the West.
Yet even like that it's only a few individuals writing the kind of stuff we
are dealing with in this discussion. So IMHO it would be nice if we started
direct legal action against named individuals. It would be better then
shutting down an entire wiki to kill a couple of parasites.
Too bad I still have to verify to what extent we can have a real impact on
such individuals. My lawyers here say we cannot take anything from a kid. Go
prove it was the father writing from the family comp...
If a person is living alone we can take his house, his car and part of his
salary until forever. That would be good, say 5-6 such examples and people
would start to be careful with what they write. But you'll never stop the
kids like that. On the opposite you'll probably excite them to even worse
vandalism based on some weird "conspiracy theory".
Not an easy decision.
Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
-----Original Message-----
From: wikipedia-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikipedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Krohon
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2007 6:09 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] From Romanian Wikipedia, the Nazi Encyclopedia
On 4/15/07, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra(a)ukr.net> wrote:
Communities are free to publish what they wish in principle, and wmf is
free
to decide whether this is wiki or not. If not then the project cannot use
a
wikipedia trademark. Apart from that any community is obviously free to
publish a fully creationist wiki, a pro-terrorism wiki, a
"kill-them-niggers" wiki or whatever else.
Only if they wish to go that way they must do it under their own logo and
they must pay for servers, development and bandwidth from their own
wallets.
They also have to deal with the cops themselves, since some of these POVs
are treated as crimes in some nations.
Berto 'd Sera
Personagi dl'ann 2006 per l'arvista american-a Time (tanme tuti vojaotri)
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html
The best part of this discussion up to now. While fully agree with it we may
evaluate if the local wikipedia is being well maintained on other subjects.
Having a handful of bad articles around may be a bearable price for an
otherwise fair and growing local wikipedia. On the other hand, if the
administrators just took the Romanian wikipedia as a free add service, expel
them all.
Krohon
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