[Foundation-l] REPOST: free speech and wikinews

[Chad Perrin]

On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 10:20:09PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
> Anthere appears to have inserted her replies into Dovi's email without
> any indication of who is saying what. No doubt it's just a client issue,
> I don't mean to blame anyone. I just wanted to help out by reposting it
> in the right quotation style.
> 

Thank you very much.  With the volume of email I get daily, most of it
important, I was actually not going to read that one because of the
extra time investment involved in separating the speakers' words.  I
appreciate the help you offered in that area as much as I appreciate the
effort Anthere put into composing the email in the first place.

That aside, I have my own comments to offer on the subject, now that
I've seen Anthere's response:

I actually agree more with Dovi than with Anthere, in terms of what has
been said.  I very much believe that without simply acting as though
free speech in the political sense, we cannot take advantage of free
speech in the "free content" sense to gain the benefits we seek for the
efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects.  However (yes, there's a
however):

The initial goal of this effort as a whole was distributing encyclopedic
knowledge to the world at large.  If a new Wikinews project might
interfere with the ability to get a Wikipedia into the hands of people
worldwide, I tend to think that the proposed Wikinews project's goals
must take a back seat to those of the already existing Wikipedia
project.  Even if you remove the distinction between Wikipedia and
Wikinews, the distinction between "already existing" and "proposed" must
be taken into account: it is my belief that we cannot in good conscience
take steps in the creation of a new project that we have reason to
believe will not only bring about its own failure but that of an already
existing project.  Balance that against my impression that the various
Wikipedias should take precedence over their sibling Wikinews projects,
and bake at 400 degrees for thirty-five minutes for a nice souffle.

Ahem.  What I'm trying to say is this:  We should definitely try to make
a Chinese Wikinews happen if we can do so without killing off the
Chinese Wikipedia, as well as itself, in the same effort.  Yes, stand up
for principle, but do so in a manner that doesn't kill the principle at
the same time.

This is just the opinion of one man.  Feel free to disagree.  Don't
attribute it to anyone else besides me without asking them first.  Have
a nice day.

--
Chad Perrin
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