[Foundation-l] Software Policy Draft

[Platonides]

Simetrical wrote:
 > 4.1 Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document's
 > text and any  text equivalents (e.g., captions). [Priority 1]
 >     For example, in HTML use the "lang" attribute. In XML, use 
"xml:lang".
 >
 > 1.1 isn't failed by anything in the software itself, I don't think,
 > but we make it practically impossible for in-article images to pass
 > it.  4.1 isn't followed anywhere, we have one big lang attribute for
 > everything last I checked.


There're some templates, but not too used. They mostly exist to fix 
browser rendering bugs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Lang
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:IPA



Tim Starling wrote:
> Seems like instruction creep to me. Why do we need such a policy? Have 
> there been any challenges to these principles lately? Are there likely to be?
> 
> -- Tim Starling

I don't see that it really adds anything, but could give problems on 
strict reading of the letter.
When is a format free and when not?

Are Pdfs free?
Were Gif free when there patents were active because you could create 
"uncompressed" gifs?
Is Djvu if you need propietary software to get efficient compression? [1]
Is our content free because i could wget -m en.wikipedia.org ?
Are our dumps free just because the content is self-descriptive (ie. i 
could create my own parser)?
Are our dumps equally free without mwdumper (java is free but not 
usable) as they could be imported (reeaally slowly) with importDump.php?


Not that i'm against the spirit of the resolution, but its wording is a 
troll [2]. See the "Wikimedia logos on Commons" thread on foundation-l 
about the suposed contradiction between non-free WMF logos and the image 
resolution [3]. And it doesn't really matter, as it's a non-written 
rule, and such a change would pass through brion, which is a Foundation 
employee.
Rather a board resolution, i think it would be better as a board 
recommendation.

Just my 2 cents.


[1] http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6131#c8
[2] Troll (post) http://catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html
[3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/19410