[WikiEN-l] in the last year wanting to impose policy seems to have become acceptable

[David Gerard]

On 07/04/04 15:02, Robert wrote:

> But in the last year hatespeech seems to have become
> acceptable, and those who use it have been rewarded, while
> victims of it are attacked. This is a sad turn of events,
> and will cause Wikipedia's repuation to suffer terribly.
> Already many academics I know view Wikipedia as hopeless;
> but if this phenomenon spreads its reputation will be
> hopelessly tarnished.


This sounds like circular discussions with 142/entmoots on IRC.
He says Wikipedia's policy direction is hopelessly flawed and he
wants to change it to protect the 'GFDL corpus'.

If you think Wikipedia is hopelessly flawed and already doomed,
why are you still here?

That question doesn't mean 'go away'. It means 'why not fork?'
The text won't be lost - that's what 'open content' means. Text
can flow back and forth.

This is not a meaningless suggestion - this is precisely what
happened to es: to form Enciclopedia-Libre. The volunteers didn't
like a floated policy and got up en masse and went elsewhere to
form a project that is still vital and going strong. Volunteer
motivation is incredibly powerful, but incredibly fragile.

RK, if you really believe Wikipedia needs the policy you advocate:
make a fork and proceed. The text will be fine. If you are right,
the volunteers will follow you. If you are wrong, they won't.

(These are probably in no way the opinions of the Wikimedia
Foundation. I think active forks may well be a good thing; I think
many others will strongly disagree ...)

This, by the way, also answers entmoot/142's arguments that
Wikipedia needs factions. No, it needs *forks*. So 142, Lir,
Plato, Mr-Natural-Health and Irismeister can work on Redpedia,
producing GFDL material their way and using anything they want
from Wikipedia. What they cannot do is force the volunteers to
want to put up with them.

The text will remain GFDL. But the volunteers are what make a
project active. will the volunteers want to work under your policies?
So far they want to work under the present ones. But if you
push through your favoured policy and they don't like it, they
*will* get up and leave.


- d.