[WikiEN-l] African maps

[geni]

On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Absolutely, there's lots of reasons, but the reasons should be there on
> an item by item basis.  Do we need to indiscriminately host their entire
> corpus of maps when we only have use for a few?

There are very few things we need to do. In this case the reason is why not?

> We all love to hate M*******t,

Speak for yourself.

>partly because it dominates its
> industry.

Plently of other industries have been dominated to the same degree
without the same level of disslike.

> We need to be conscious of not becoming resentfully referred
> to as W*******a because of our dominance.

Nah people will find plently of other reasons to disslike us. They already do.

> I think that it's important
> to view ourselves as a part of a community of websites developing free
> access to information.  That requires maintaining the respect of other
> members of that community, and you don't do that by raiding their
> efforts.

How many flicker images do we have these days anyway. One of the
common values of provideing free stuff is seeing it reused.

> The survival of a vision depends on sharing that vision, and
> that cannot happen if our allied co-visionaries are  put in a position
> where they need to defend their efforts from the superpower on the block.
>

Why would they need to do that? What do people lose by haveing their
material on wikimedia projects?

You see a key part of the vission of free material is that others will
use it. There are probably near 1000 sites that use large chunks of
wikimedia material.

> Ethical considerations rest upon forseeing the consequences of one's own
> actions.  Ethics are not governed by rules and laws, nor are they
> imposed through fear of arbitrary ounishment.  Ethics involves a
> willingness to be at a disadvantage when it is the right thing to do.
>

That would really rather depend on the system of ethics. Calling your
morality an ethical system does not make it so.

-- 
geni