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

[David Gerard]

2008/12/25 Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>:

> Hard to keep things straight isn't it when the object is to make a point.
> I speak of Red China, still controlled by Mao's heirs.


Well, yes. (Who thankfully are not gross incompetents at the actual
management to the degree he was.) And it turns out that remaining
politically neutral is one of the best things we can do as well as the
cheapest and easiest, because we have the moral high ground and we're
not going away. And as economics shifts to information, we have
credibility to the skies. "Information wants to be free" means "it
leaks like a gas" and "running a Great Firewall is like trying to
carry air in a bucket".

Abandoning neutrality as a general operating principle (manifested as
NPOV on Wikipedia, variants on other projects where that doesn't make
direct sense) would be a disaster. Possibly a greater one than putting
ads on the site (and I wouldn't object to ads on the site, but I
realise enough people despise them that it'd be utterly unworkable).

Can you and Kurt come up with a proposal that doesn't abandon our
fabulously useful and marketable air of neutrality?

[We will leave for the moment post-modernist arguments about the
impossibility of neutrality, or the quite accurate argument that
running an Enlightenment-style encyclopedia project is itself pushing
a huge and detailed point of view in all sorts of ways. You know what
I mean by the question.]

Oh, and Merry Christmas. That's CHRISTMAS, as detailed in the King
James Version! [* may not be 100% verifiable or not original research]


- d.


- d.