Just making sure there's no confusion. The statement of principles in Anthere's response to Ec is taken from the page of User:Jimbo Wales. Presumably Anthere was using it to save Jimbo the work of responding to Ec personally, since Ec's post can be seen as a bit of a challenge to Jimbo's ideas about the project.

To clarify the point that apparently caused Chris some confusion--"The topic of Wikipedia articles should always look outward not inward at the Wikipedia itself."--I would interpret this as saying that Wikipedia content should be independent of, and normally not discuss, internal Wikipedia/Wikimedia politics and management issues. The primary forum for that discussion should be the mailing lists.

Anyway, I suppose now is as good a time as any to haul those principles out once again and debate them. On that particular point, I believe that Wikimedia will eventually become "a large and famous organization" as Jimbo recently put it (and perhaps more quickly than he suggests). And as the depth and breadth of our content increases, some of the things that seem internal now will warrant treatment in the encyclopedia that Wikipedia aspires to be. After all, what happens when some journalist or historian writes a book about the story of Wikipedia, whether the book be a hatchet job or hagiography? You can't just ignore it (nor do we, judging by how carefully we follow our press coverage).

Fortunately, the mailing lists and page histories are all, or almost all, archived, for the benefit of whoever wants to tackle that task.

--Michael Snow