[Foundation-l] RfC: Mission & Vision Statements of the Wikimedia Foundatio

[Alphax (Wikipedia email)]

Anthere wrote:
> Erik Moeller wrote:
>> On 11/17/06, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> OK... except that Erik specifically stated that these mission and
>>> vision statements would be the things cited in explaining why WMF
>>> would or would not support WikiFoo.
>>
>> Only in a very broad and general way. We want to be careful not to
>> exclude too much a priori. But I am personally very much in favor of
>> using the word "Knowledge" in the Mission & Vision statements, because
>> it is, depending on how we interpret it (and we can argue for an
>> interpretation based on the existing projects), already a fairly good
>> limitation of scope. Florence has now objected to this word in the
>> unstable Mission Statement and replaced it with "content". I still
>> haven't seen an adequate explanation why "knowledge" should not be
>> used.
> 
> I answered here: 
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mission/Unstable#knowledge_under_a_free_license
> 
> I have not *now* objected to the use of the word knowledge in the 
> mission statement. This objection has been raised during the board 
> retreat, left unsolved at the end of it, and was actually listed as the 
> things for which no agreement was reached. So, this objection is now 
> nearly a month old.
> 
> One of the arguments you used against the word "content" is that 
> Stallman did not like the use of this word. I object to the word 
> knowledge, because I do not think this is what we are doing. We seek to 
> have all human being knowledgeable (that's definitly our vision), but 
> knowledge is an unpalpable concept. And we are doing something very 
> palpable. One of the relevant argument against the use of this word is 
> that "knowledge" can not be copyrighted, so producing freely-licenced 
> knowledge makes no sense. My most compelling argument is that 
> "knowledge" is something personnal. Something different for each person.
> 
<snip>

Agree with all of that. The problem is that when you talk about
"knowledge" you have to add the disclaimer "not in the biblical sense",
and that if it's "information" we've got, hello Wikistalk...

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