[Foundation-l] How not to manage opensource project

[Lars Aronsson]

Anthere wrote:

> We may use the same words (managing, governing), but these words 
> do not have the same sense in my country and in yours. Saying 
> your sense is the "correct" one, while our sense is the "wrong" 
> one, would be a very wrong approach.

As long as the discussion is in English, the English meaning of 
the words is the correct one.  When the text is translated to 
French, other words that have the same meaning must be chosen. 
Sorry, I don't speak French so I can't help out with details.

But in this case, the cultural difference seems to be about how 
much importance is given to a single word.  I haven't seen the 
French participants explain exactly which practical problems or 
consequences they see from Jimbo's statement, or how they suggest 
he should have phrased it instead.  Without this explanation, 
their apparent anger seems irrational.  Perhaps this is a sign 
that something else is wrong?  Perhaps they want to be angry?

In January 2001 Jimbo was careless enough to say Wikipedia might 
have advertising in the future, or something to that end.  You can 
of course interpret words such as "advertising", "might" and 
"future" very differently, but the practical problem is that many 
would dislike the non-commercial wikipedia.org (then .com) to look 
like normal commercial websites.  The consequence at that time was 
that the Spanish user community forked and moved to their own 
website, not because this problem had occurred, but because they 
feared it might occur, perhaps in the near future.  (There could 
of course have been other reasons for the fork, and maybe this 
statement was used only as an excuse. I don't know that, but I 
happen to know that setting up your own server can be great fun.)  
Jimbo later clarified that he saw advertising as a possible last 
resort, i.e. a much weaker interpretation of "might" and "future", 
but then the Spanish fork had already taken place.

Really, all that is required is to "assume good faith".  When a 
statement sounds like terrible news, perhaps there was a simple 
mistake in translation.  It is better to ask for a clarification 
before starting to get angry.

Hmm... there is no French interwiki link for
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se