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

[Stan Shebs]

jkelly at fas.harvard.edu wrote:

>  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.
>
To me it says that en: has gotten big. I think the old assumption
was that the definition of admin as "trustworthy editor" really
meant that admins would naturally tend to be in agreement about
philosophy and principles. Nowadays there are whole groups of
admins that are unaware of each other's existence, and I think it's
possible to get voted in on adminship by subgroups of editors,
without ever absorbing much of the general culture.

>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 this is another example of the leadership vacuum that we
discussed earlier, and shows why it is not a trivial issue. We have
no effective process for dealing with a group of fifty admins who
collectively decide to take WP in a different direction; while I
don't see rebel groups of that size yet, the responses to Kelly's
RFC suggest that some may be in the process of forming.

Stan