[Foundation-l] Our values

[Ray Saintonge]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> On 9/1/07, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>   
>> This strikes me as somewhat reversed from our typical practice---we have
>> goals, like creating a neutral, wide-coverage, multi-lingual
>> encyclopedia, or a repository of free media, etc., and then we choose
>> means to those goals based on what we find works and doesn't work. We
>> use wikis, for example, because they work better than Nupedia did, not
>> because we love wikis; and we use consensus-based decision making
>> because it seems to work better than the alternatives, not because we
>> have some attachment to consensus-based political systems ([[en:WP:NOT]]
>> has said as much for many years).
>>     
> To some extent I agree with you. However:
>
> - Quality (which encompasses many dimensions) may at first seem
> blatantly obvious, but it's quite clear that many similar knowledge
> collecting websites do _not_ emphasize quality, sometimes deliberately
> so to focus on collecting large amounts of factoids or uploads (think
> UrbanDictionary. YouTube). I'm not sure how much one can believe in
> quality as a "value", though.
>   
At first blush quality seems like an obvious value, but when you reflect 
upon it it ends up looking like some kind of weaselly tautology.  
Everyone except the vandals wants a better Wikipedia.  Even the 
neo-Nazis, when considered from their own warped perspective, want to 
improve Wikipedia.  As long as individuals insist on their own 
interpretation of quality it becomes a convenient justification for all 
manner of incivility, for pompous notions of notability and for removing 
concepts before their full impact can be evaluated.  An obsession with 
quality destroys quality.
> - I do not believe that we should ever sacrifice friendliness "for the
> greater good". At the most, we should downgrade it to politeness, but
> we should never be impolite or unfriendly, and in fact build a
> community which strongly emphasizes this throughout its projects.
> (Mind you, I do not claim that I or anyone else can always live up to
> that goal, but I consider it a failing when we do not do so.) Anyone
> who has been on the Internet for a while knows that this idea is far
> from self-evident.
>   
Absolutely.  Whether you call it friendliness or politeness doesn't 
really matter.  And too, we always need to be aware of our human 
fallibilities, to the point where we recognize that we are all prone to 
occasionally act out of frustration. Perhaps the implicit value here is 
that Wikipedians are as important as Wikipedia, and that the process of 
contributing is as important as he contribution itself.  Persistent 
bullying should be frowned upon as much as any other bad behaviour.
> - "Participation" and "openness" are perhaps a bit shallow, but it
> seems clear that we are trying to empower the greatest number of
> people possible to make a positive contribution to free knowledge &
> free culture. We're not trying to empower idiots and trolls, of
> course. How could this goal of empowering _good_ contributors be
> phrased as a value?
>   
The value is that anybody can edit.  Some restrictions remain necessary 
to deal with the worst offenders, but they must remain minimal.  Some 
forms of bad behaviour occur only rarely.  For much of these it may be 
simpler to just clean up the damage and go on with life instead of 
implementing sophisticated prevention measures that make everybody's 
life miserable.
> I like the slogan "knowledge without boundaries" because it
> encompasses, in my view, this element of openness, while also
> describing a few other beliefs (the value of knowledge, the idea that
> everyone should have access to free education, and so forth).
>   
Perhaps this could shorten to "knowledge unbounded". ;-) 
Put out a few possibilities and see which get used.
> - I liked the explanation of the word "pioneering" that the group gave
> which came up with it. We're not always the first to come up with a
> great feature, but we sure as hell are quick to integrate it if it's
> libre & useful.
>   
We are well into uncharted paradigms.  We ain't seen nothin' yet!
> - I do not much like "diversity" as a value and said as much during
> our discussions; it sounds too much like corporate-speak to me without
> really signifying much.
>   
Yeah, it's like all those people who say that they have discussed a 
variety of solutions to a problem, but are unable to specify a single 
one. :-)

Ec