BJörn Lindqvist wrote:
On 2/17/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/17/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
If Wikipedia isn't mine, then who owns it? Who gets to decide whether
Wikipedia is, to the best of my knowledge, owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.
I agree. But the Wikimedia Foundation only owns Wikipedia in one of thre three following facets of Wikipedia:
- Wikipedia, the worlds biggest collection of organised information.
- Wikipedia, the great community who have created #1.
- Wikipedia, the trademark and the servers used to run #1.
You argued that since I am not a member of the Wikimedia Foundation I don't have the write to write "I'm a fish" on my user page, if I recall. Also, to the best of my knowledge the Wikimedia Foundation has not banned writing "I'm a fish" on my user page. And since you are not, AFAIK, a part of the Wikimedia Foundation you really can not ban writing "I'm a fish" on my user page.
Do you understand? The question of ownership is utterly irrelevant to this discussion. Neither you nor I are owners, therefore please do not try to make it sound like your opinion is the Wikimedia Foundation's one.
Actually, the charter of the Foundation appears to indicate all of us are members of the Foundation. Maybe you mean "not a member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees"? And I think much of the rest of your post is a strawman -- Steve only pointed out a fact (Wikipedia is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation); he didn't ban (or say he could ban) you from putting "I'm a fish" on your userpage. And while you certainly can do that, the Wikimedia Foundation can very well ban you from doing it. So, yes, the question of ownership is very relevant to this discussion, especially since you brought it up ("If Wikipedia isn't mine, then who owns it?").
John