[Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people

[Nathan]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 5:33 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I fully agree with you. Any information is educational; it just depends
> of particular project scope would it be there or not. For example, you
> don't want to put Shakespeare's works on Wikipedia, because the proper
> place for it is Wikisource. Particular colony of ants is educational and
> could be interesting for making a photo of it, but it is not likely that
> it would get an article on Wikipedia. And so on.
>
> But, why then Board decided to force "educational" component as
> mandatory in its statement? If there is no difference between
> "informational" and "educational", statement "we host only content that
> is both free and educational in nature" doesn't have a lot of sense, as
> it would sound like "we only host content which is free" (and that's the
> very known information), as "content" is more precise synonym for
> "information" (to be precise "content" could be interpreted as "set of
> information" or so).
>
> So, I would like to know distinction between "informational" and
> "educational" interpreted by Board members; or it is, as you and Michael
> said, just not so common interpretation of the synonyms of the adjective
> "educational".
>

I doubt the language selection was parsed to such a degree. Whatever
the difference, it's minor, and I seriously doubt they meant to
exclude Wikinews (or, for that matter, the huge volume of data hosted
on all the projects that is meta-content rather than outward-facing
educational material) from the umbrella mission of the WMF. Seems like
there are more substantial questions about the resolution the Board
could address.

Nathan