[WikiEN-l] What is the fundamental goal of the project?

[Matt R]

--- Omegatron <omegatron+wikienl at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm basing this concept of "primary and secondary goals" on the
> wording of the fair use policy page itself.  The way the page is
> currently worded, writing a high-quality encyclopedia is a means to
> the end of creating free content.  This is quite a silly notion, to me
> at least.

That would be quite a silly notion, but nobody is arguing that.
 
Wikipedia is a Wikimedia Foundation project, and "Wikimedia Foundation is
dedicated to the development and maintenance of online free, open content
encyclopedias, collections of quotations, textbooks and other collections of
documents, information, and other informational databases in all the languages
of the world that will be distributed free of charge to the public under a free
documentation license such as the Free Documentation License written by the
Free Software Foundation Inc. at http://www.fsf.org or similar licensing
scheme, see http://www.wikimedia.org."

The goal includes freedom.

> So we allow non-free content whenever it is encyclopedic, legal and doesn't 
> displace equivalent free content.

No, we don't. I refer you to [[WP:FAIR]] for the actual policy.

> I think you mean "It's fruitless to try to reach a consensus about the
> details of any particular policy when a small group of users have
> modified it to suit their ideals and are unwilling to compromise".

No, I mean what I actually said: "It seems fruitless to argue about the details
of any particular policy if we disagree on the purpose of the project."

-- Matt

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Matt_Crypto
Blog: http://cipher-text.blogspot.com


		
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