[WikiEN-l] Fwd: IDG press enquiry regarding the HD-DVD controversy

[Todd Allen]

On 5/4/07, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/4/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 04/05/07, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Profile wise it is big. This has nothing to do with the amount of
> > > compensation the MPAA would win but with scareing people into
> > > following the law in future.
> >
> > It would be crippling to our mission to roll over so easily.
>
> This is assuming the mission of Wikipedia and WMF is to stand up
> against bad laws the community does not like. However, it is not.
>
> As Geni said, Wikipedia is a big target because fo the top 10, biggest
> reference site, yada yada. In that sense, the community has been one
> of the more responsible folks out there. I'm not even sure the NY
> Times knows the signifiance of publishing the 16 bytes on their site.
>
> FYI, the following is a good summary of the community consensus (at
> least the en: sysop irc-enabled consensus on the day of this issue),
> penned by some of the folks in this thread.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Keyspam
>
> -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
>
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No, it is assuming that Wikipedia's mission is to be a reference work,
otherwise known as an encyclopedia. The last message we want to send
is "If you're big and bad enough, and you don't like what we say, make
rumblings about a lawsuit. It'll be gone within the hour." The message
we want to send is "We're a reference work. We publish numerical
values all over the place. It's not a "circumvention tool", it is a
-number-. Its decimal value is somewhere around 1.325E37.

That's it, that's all. Avogadro's number is around 6.022E23. What if
this number also happened to be Avogadro's number? Would that now be
an illegal number, that chemists and physicists fear to speak? If it's
the number of atoms in a sample that a scientist comes up with while
writing a paper, has that scientist written an "illegal paper"? What
about the number of kilometers from here to a given point in space?
This number could represent any or all of those things, and I
guarantee you, somewhere, there's a sample with that many atoms in it,
and a point in space that many kilometers away.

A number is not a "circumvention device". It is a numeric value. The
hex code makes it look all exotic (if you're not a programmer,
anyway), but it's -just a number-. God forbid they ever use really
weak encryption, or we'll be prohibited from saying 2+2=4. More on
that below.

-- 
Freedom is the right to know that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.