On Fri, Jun 20, 2003 at 09:18:00AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I'm pleased to announce the existence of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit corporation organized under the laws of Florida, United States. I am transferring to this new corporation the assets that follow: ...
That's great. Now that this long-lasting issue has been solved, let's focus in the other ones that aren't, and that are really important:
- Unprivilegiation of the English wikipedia: The way it's setup now (http://www.wikipedia.org = english. others are ?.wikipedia.org) is totally discriminative , offensive and degrading for the other languages, that are placed into a not-as-important position. - Migration of all wikipedias to the phase3 software. There are still many of them, like the catalan one, running Phase1. This one in particular does have really good traffic of changes laterly, but the old software is driving it into an everyday more chaotic situation. - More openness in general, public discusion of decisions before them being made. - Distribution of the servers all arround the world, allowing every one of them to mirror backups for all the others, and avoiding this way any kind of censorship originated by having a single server unther the US laws.
Until then, me and a lot of people have freezed any kind of contribution. Myself, I'm specially angry about the english-as-the-main-language-and-others-just-secoundary thing, and about it being not solved even after years listening to people asking so.
By the way, if you're interested in a spanish language free encyclopedia, we mantain http://enciclopedia.us.es/, that was a spanish wikipedia fork done because of a group of people not happy about those and other wikipedia issues. It is actually way bigger (does have near 15.000 articles) than the spanish wikipedia, and hopes to be able to re-merge with wikipedia someday, after all the issues are solved. -- Because ten billion years' is so fragile, so ephemeral... it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness. ("Now and Then, Here and There"'s Opening)