[Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy

[David Gerard]

2009/11/22 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>:

> Keep in mind that this is not about non-free content, this is not
> about a possibility that professor didn't understand all consequences
> of his approval; this is just about The Form. The Bureaucracy. Note,
> also, that this cooperation exists for four years. I don't think that
> it is reasonable.


Oh, certainly. The sort of case you describe is just silly.

A lot of the problem is that Wikipedia attracts geeks, who tend to
trying to render things black-and-white wherever possible. So they get
heavily bureaucratic with very little impetus.

The problem here with clearing away the bureaucracy is that the
impetus for it makes repeated checking sometimes necessary.

(e.g. I'm appalled that the Flickr copyright checker is just a bot to
go to Flickr and look at what the CC licence there is, rather than a
human sanity-checking whether it's plausible the Flickr poster really
does have the right to release the image. I don't mean a complicated
process, I mean even checking that it's plausible.)

I don't know of an easy solution that doesn't involve spreading the
notion of free content further. Using ourselves as the existence proof
helps in my experience - i.e., "of course you can give everything away
and do well. We do, and you're talking to me because we do."


- d.