[Foundation-l] No rights to participate

[Fred Bauder]

> In a message dated 5/22/2011 9:31:30 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
> fredbaud at fairpoint.net writes:
>
>
>> Legally, Wikipedia is private property belonging to a nonprofit
>> corporation. If the United States government, or some other government,
>> owned it and regulated it in such a way as to guarantee public access
>> it
>> would be a public website.
>>
>
> My point Fred, is there is no such animal.  So calling something a
> "private
> website" is redundant, since all websites are private, there are no
> public
> websites.  Certainly there are websites owned by governments, but they
> are
> not public in the sense above that there is guaranteed access to *modify*
> their contents.
>

There are public spaces which are enforced, for example, freedom of
religion or of the press in the United States. But you are correct that
words alone fail; such guarantees must be enforced by citizens with a
commitment to them. But that is not fundamentally different from how
Wikipedia, or any voluntary organization, works.

Fred