[Foundation-l] Board meeting report

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2008 at 10:45 PM, Kat Walsh <kat at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> As Michael says, there weren't really any hard decisions made on this
> -- more of a discussion of our varying points of view and reasoning.
> And so I will give my own opinion in response to his: I'm in favor of
> having a firm resolution so there is some clear and definite text to
> point to that says we do have that commitment to openness, and gives a
> set of criteria to evaluate a new proposal with. (It's possible the
> drafting may turn out to exclude something we all agree should be
> permitted, or have other unintended consequences, in which case I
> think we could all agree to amend it! I don't believe the current
> proposal disallows anything we would allow -- in particular it takes
> into account things like acceptable subsets of otherwise problematic
> formats -- but I hope people will correct obvious omissions in the
> posted draft.) But I think it would be worthwhile to have as an
> explanation of what we're doing -- or not doing -- and why.

The current proposal seems to ban anything that's not standardized,
which is a *lot* of stuff.  Various microformats, to begin with, but
also quite importantly wikitext.  That seems to be a critical problem.
 A possibly less pressing problem is that it rules out the use of
proprietary technologies to provide fallbacks for standard formats,
which we might not want.

I've commented at <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_format_policy>.
 (Although if my comments are helpful, maybe they'd have been more so
before the Board meeting . . .)