[Foundation-l] It is high time we decided upon global Wikimedianprinciples

[Austin Hair]

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 9:08 AM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 2:49 PM, Dror K <dror1975 at icqmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> Currently we have very few global principles for the Wikimeian projects,
>> namely the GFDL principle and maybe the NPOV principle. We have many
>> recommendations listed on the Meta, which are not taken seriously in
>> many projects. Wikimedia projects have grown tremendously, and in my
>> opinion, it has become crucial that the list of principles governing all
>> projects be a little more detailed.
>
> Why? Things have worked pretty well so far, on many projects.

And on others, not so much.  We have projects where the community is
dictated to by a vocal minority of administrators; we even have
editors organized into hierarchies based on the quantity and quality
of their contributions.  I've had administrators on minor-language
Wikipedias stare at me blankly when I explained the concept of NPOV,
and it was less than a year ago that we had to explain the notion of
Free licensing to a not-so-minor language project, who, when informed
that their "used with permission" images weren't acceptable under the
GFDL, wanted the Foundation to pursue reusers after they re-tagged
them GFDL.

Back in Days of Yore, when our view was "if you build it, they will
come," we set up lots of Wikipedias without actual communities of
editors.  What filled the vacuum wasn't always connected with the
broader Wikimedia community, and we shouldn't assume that everyone
falls in line with the "mainstream" culture of our European-language
projects.

Austin