Re: [Mediawiki-l] Moral standards

Mediawiki is free software, per the free software definition[1]:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
* The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to

make it do what you wish. * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor. * The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others.

Note that the first of these precludes moral restrictions on reuse of the program. You may consider this problematic, but freedom is considered by many to be the more important moral imperative.

That is a moral standard. Freedom is more important then moral imperative. Thanks. But unfortunately this moral standard is not used on Wikipedia itself. I do not have the freedom to vandalise Wikipedia. If I would do so there are procedures to stop me. And I do agree these procedure are there.

So the moral standard on Wikipedia seems to be the contrary of the moral standards in this newsgroup. That is possible but inconsistent.

I think this community can manage a discussion on moral standards, although it seems far away from the daily activity in this newsgroup.

Discussion on moral standards are always a bit painful. Why a discussion if there is no problem? Why talking when you can prevent talking? There is an other large organisation who pretend there moral standards are higher then the outside world. I see some steps : First : There was denial. Second : Complains could go to a subdepartment nobody new and nobody cares about. Third : Our moral standards are so high we can solve this ourself Fourth : They accept the moral standards of the outside world also applies to them

As a very old and slow organisation all of this took many years and is still not finished.

Let I be clear; I do like the community, I do like the MediaWiki software I do like quality, and to improve quality, and I do like high moral standards.

Discussion of use is not entirely off-topic here - witness the recent discussion on the efficacy of using a WYSIWYG editor on an intranet installation of MediaWiki. But again, that addresses pure utility, rather than moral considerations per se.

So It's not clear how moral considerations are relevant to the list, if not entirely off-topic.[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

• d.

I started to say I wanted to prevent to talk about concrete situations and persons. That would make the discussion nasty and not productive. But take my word, this discussion is very relevant for this newsgroup if I read the kind of questions and answers posted in this newsgroup.

With regards,

Bernard