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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 11/16/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
[snip]
> The statement
> will presumably be translated (both linguistically and culturally) into
> as many languages as required, where it strikes me as normal that every
> person will imagine in the context of a world vision unique his own
> language and culture.  We want a Yaqui person to imagine within the
> context of a world not too dissimilar to that described by Castañeda.
> Vision may not even be about language, so why restrict vision by
> mentioning it.

Thank you, this was the point I was trying to make about our proposed
vision statement already capturing the required aspects of
multilinguality.

> In fact I would be inclined to shorten the statement even furtherr to
>
>     '''Imagine a world in which every person can freely share all
>     knowledge.'''

So, while I agree with every point of your reduction and I recognize
that my argument would apply to the initial draft just as well,  I'm a
bit concerned that a vision of  "Imagine a world in which every person
can freely share all knowledge" fails do differentiate us from
communications technology projects like Freenet
(http://freenetproject.org/whatis.html) or a project to make 'Free
Hardware' networking equipment. :)

None of the current Wikimedia projects, for example, are currently
intended to facilitate the sharing of all fetish porn videos. But are
not these videos a part of all knowledge taken in the absolute sense?

> "The sum of" is a pointless redundancy and cliché.

To me, "The sum of"  implies aggregation, distillation, and synthesis.
Perhaps my understanding of the words is unconventional?

In any case, I believe our vision should succinctly express an
intention to not merely facilitate a lossless retransmission of all
data, but to enable the world through repositories of  knowledge in
the most useful and apropreiately accessible forms.

I thought "the sum of" took us closer to that...