[WikiEN-l] Invited by admin to leave en if concerned about free reusability

[jkelly at fas.harvard.edu]

  Hi,

  It seems that I was recently invited by an admin to leave the en:wikipedia
project...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk%3ARequests_for_comment%2FKelly_Martin2&diff=68969013&oldid=68968296

...over my apparantly too-conservative approach to unfree content or my
understanding of Wikipedia as part of the free culture movement.  The comment
was strangely phrased, because it ended with "If you're here to do other things
than make the best possible free encyclopedia..." while the rest of it was
railing against "some la-di-da free culture movement love-in", so I may be
misunderstanding (but it is more likely that this is a "free as in beer"
usage).  In any case, I'm not taking the suggestion all that seriously, but I
do wonder what this says about where we are.  Is en a project where free
culture advocates should expect to be mocked and invited to leave?  Would there
be any interest in creating a fork of en that uses unfree content only when
absolutely necessary and in a way that such content could be easily stripped
out for reusers?  Is this local to en?  Where is people's comfort level with
emphatic disagreement over the issue?

  I think that there is plenty of room for contributors to wikimedia projects
who aren't interested in the potential for reuse of those projects, but I am
wondering where en is at if admins are actively dissuading contributors who
value it.

                                  Jkelly