[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Foundation's help to the projects

[Michael Snow]

Erik Moeller wrote:

> On 12/14/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't believe you understand how useful it would be
>> to just have some one say "That particular case is
>> unknown.  The most similar case to this is Foobar."
>> Even if there were a table of questions that people
>> have asked in the past with yes/no/unknown and no
>> futher advice would be extremely helpful.  I think it
>> a false expectation of yours that we are expecting
>> clearcut answers.  Really we have been mucking through
>> copyright questions as best we can for some time; we
>> are all well aware there are often not answers only
>> arguments.  Just being able to eliminate some
>> arguments as invalid would be very helpful.
>
> Aside from the potential issues with the WMF "officially" giving such
> advice to the communities, Brad (our GC and ED) simply doesn't have
> the time to do this. Let's brainstorm about how we can get juriwiki-l
> going, i.e. a functioning, community-driven group of advisors with
> demonstrable legal expertise.
>
> At the moment juriwiki-l is configured so that postings from the
> outside are moderated and replied to by a group of insiders. Is there
> any real issue, from a legal point of view, with making it a public
> mailing list? This is perhaps something Brad can answer.

In the context of rethinking the various internal, private mailing 
lists, I'm not sure whether it will be considered appropriate to 
continue juriwiki-l in its present form. As Anthere noted, the list is 
not all that active at present. However, it has had sporadic use and a 
variety of sensitive subjects were discussed there with an expectation 
of confidentiality. So I would strongly oppose simply converting it to a 
public list and making the accompanying archives public.

If a public list dedicated to legal issues is thought desirable, it 
should be launched separately. We had wikilegal-l before, but that too 
dwindled into oblivion.

--Michael Snow