[WikiEN-l] Reasons I care less about Wikipedia than I used to, No. 43

[Delirium]

Ron Ritzman wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 8:29 AM, James Farrar <james.farrar at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Which brings up the question "What is Wikipedia?". Is meta-content
>> like User: space and Wikipedia: space actually part of Wikipedia?
> 
> A question I thought of after reading
> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angr this]. Is Wikipedia a free
> (libre) encyclopedia or a free (beer) encyclopedia that primarily uses
> a free (libre) license?

You can view it lots of different ways, I suppose. I personally consider 
Wikipedia primarily important as a *project* to produce a free (libre) 
encyclopedia. From that perspective, our primary product is the 
downloadable dumps. Once they exist, then the rest (distribution, online 
hosting, repackaging of subsets, etc.) can be done by dozens of other 
organizations. But producing the encyclopedia is much harder, which 
we're the only ones really doing on this scale---even if you included 
non-free projects.

That said, hosting said encyclopedia for free (gratis) public access 
does also happen to be quite useful for bolstering our primary role, in 
that it attracts editors, promotes our mission, attracts goodwill for 
providing a free (and ad-free) source of information, etc.

-Mark