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

[Anthere]

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.

I will bold (/me crosses her fingers) and copy here two private 
statements I read after the retreat, which have unfortunately not been 
posted in public. I hope their authors will be fine with me doing this. 
I think their words were wise and should be there.

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Words of wisdom from Ilario

I have seen two or three contradictions during the discussions and I
would clarify them.

1.difference between "content" and "knowledge". I have had a
discussion with Oscar in a dinner but I was not sure about some
points. I have checked and I can write. The difference is not trivial.
If you know philosophy and particularly epistemology
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology] (but you can find more
in-depth informations in gnoseology) you could know that the word
"knowledge" is very complex. If you read particularly the chapter
"truth" in en.wikipedia you see that the knowledge is what you see of
the reality and IT'S THE TRUTH. From Plato to Kant there has been a
long discussion about this problem: "Can a man have the knowledge?"
"Can a man know the reality?". Saying that Wikipedia has the knowledge
we are saying that Wikipedia has the truth, that what you read in
Wikipedia cannot be discussed. It's important to understand the right
position of this word: a man can share knowledge with another man in
Wikipedia or everywhere but the knowledge cannot be "freely licensed"
and the knowledge cannot be provided by Wikipedia because the
knowledge is something personal and complex, if we accept some
positions as Empiricism, or cannot be provided by any human person, if
we accept the Platonism. There has been a long discussion in the
past... if the knowledge is provided by the religion (platonism) or by
the science (empiricism)... we are introducing a third actor:
Wikipedia :)

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Words of wisdom from Tim Shell


I spoke very briefly with Erik about this and he began taking me down a
similar path that Ilario followed here.

The term "knowledge" may have any number of esoteric meanings specific 
to any number of technical or philosophical schools of thought. 
However, 99.9% of the time, when people say knowledge, they do use the 
term in one of these esoteric senses.  The word is used commonly to 
mean, "something in your head, that you know."

Incorporating the word "knowledge" into a vision statement is a bad 
idea, in my opinion, if we are trying to use the term in some esoteric 
sense.
We would be implicitly endorsing a position, and we would be stating
something in the vision statement that most people would not fully
understand.

The objection to the use of the word "content" seemed to me to be very
weak.  Jimmy attributed to someone else the opinion that "content" 
implied something in a box that you would sell.  This is silly.  You can 
talk about the "content of one's character", the "content of a thought", 
the "semantic content of a word".  None of this has anything to do with 
boxing and selling.

Content in our sense means, basically, "stuff with information content",
or something like that.  This is what people commonly understand it to
mean in similar contexts.  So in my opinion "content" is perfectly good
for our vision statement.

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