[Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial

[Phil Nash]

Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
>> Well where will it stop? If we have a project, we should have a
>> memorial project for all disasters. I echo Mr. Bimmler in his
>> concerns about the motives behind this proposal.

I'm in some agreement here because my experience of UK charity law is that 
it is not generally permitted to have a "political" purpose, and certainly 
taking such a strong line on any "repression", "genocide" etc, would appear 
to be anathema to a charitable objective. It's OK, I suppose, if the United 
Nations has used such terminology, but I don't think we should be seen to be 
taking partisan sides in political disputes, because that dilutes the 
educational charitable status of the Foundation. It's entirely a different 
issue to support humanitarian aid to the victims, however, and I am open to 
the idea that such memorial projects might have that idea as a focus. 
However, the way it's been put forward seems to militate against that 
construction.

>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
>> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
>> <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 2:12:25 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions
>> Memorial
>>
>>> 2008/12/24 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>> A project which is motivated in such a way cannot possibly be
>>>> anything else than biased...and indeed, the very concept of
>>>> memorials is biased: Why should we have a memorial of the victims
>>>> of Soviet Repression, when we don't have a memorial of Nazi
>>>> victims, victims of the Armenian Genocide, victim of the Rwandan
>>>> Genocide, victims of various repression regimes in South-East Asia
>>>> and China, victims in Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic
>>>> etc. etc.
>>>> No one can sensibly suggest that we can have memorial sites for
>>>> every "repression" (in lack of a better word) in history and thus,
>>>> we had better none, in my opinion.  (Yes, in other cases I argued
>>>> and would argue that it is better to have "something" than
>>>> "nothing", but in this case, I'm afraid I am not convinced of the
>>>> merits of the proposal at all and of the propriety of the motives
>>>> behind it)
>>>
>>>
>>> Yes. However, it could be a valuable wiki to create privately.
>>> Generic hosting is (a) really cheap (b) often includes MediaWiki
>>> out the box. The wiki is unlikely to be vastly overloaded, so cheap
>>> hosting would do for a start.
>>>
>>> See http://www.sep11memories.org/wiki/In_Memoriam for a memorial
>>> project for victims of the World Trade Center attack, for example.
>>>
>>> Although started with a strong POV, such a project could
>>> nevertheless accumulate material of high quality historical and
>>> scholarly interest.
>>>
>>>
>>> - d.
>>
>> I support this project, and don't think it should get pushed off into
>> some obscure corner of the internet. We should host it. We should
>> host it
>> because we stand against totalitarian repression; and reject the
>> position
>> that some knowledge, knowledge of the consequences of totalitarian
>> repression, is to be repressed and not readily available.
>>
>> Fred Bauder
>>
>>
>>
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