Does the entire encyclopedia need to be editable? What types of edits must be allowed? Can there be centralized control, for instance linkback requirements?
None of these questions have anything at all to do with the question of GNU-freedom. These are internal policies of administration, and we have pretty well-developed answers for all of them, right?
I think you misunderstood the question, as it was related to what types of edits, and linkback requirements are required under copyright law, but I can guess your answer, anyway.
All this talk of whether or not things are "free enough" led me to
believe
that there was a lot of grey area. Maybe I'm wrong, and we do agree on
what
it means to be a free encyclopedia, we just haven't agreed that we want
to
be a free encyclopedia.
With all due respect, Anthony, I think you're just trolling here.
My comments were rhetorical. If that makes them trolling, then I guess I was trolling. But I wasn't *just* trolling.
We know what it means to be a free encyclopedia, and we draw on longstanding traditions in the free software community to flesh out the details of that meaning. We have been committed from day one (day one of Nupedia, even) to be a free encyclopedia in the sense of GNU-freedom.
You have been. Most of the other early members have been. But much of the community is not. This isn't to say that many people reject having a free encyclopedia, but there are many who just don't understand what that means to Wikipedia. For example, it was only when you made an official statement that noncommercial only images weren't allowed in Wikipedia that many Wikipedians would even consider them to be a bad thing, and even now there is no effort to remove these images and there are people actively fighting against their removal. I don't see how you can say that the community is on the same page on this. It's clearly not true.
Acting as if there's some deep philosophical division within the project, or some less-than-complete commitment to freedom is an insult to many of us who have been working so hard for so long to achieve exactly that.
I'm sorry that you're insulted by this. But at this point the amount of work that is necessary to legally redistribute Wikipedia, even in the United States for non-commercial purposes, is enormous, and so in that sense freedom has not been achieved.
As you've been insulted and don't even believe I'm being serious, I'll continue this discussion no further. Feel free to reply publically and/or privately if you'd like, but I give up.
--Jimbo
Anthony