[Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Michael Snow wrote:
> On 6/9/2010 12:12 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
>   
>> Michael Snow wrote:
>>    
>>     
>>> There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that
>>> issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is
>>> clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at
>>> supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be
>>> putting in control of their own quest for information.
>>>
>>>      
>>>       
>> I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission
>> is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in
>> terms of what is available. We make things available, and they
>> should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what
>> we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission.
>>    
>>     
> My point has nothing to do with making things unavailable. There are 
> other ways of supporting reader choice. As for the pretense that it's 
> possible to sidestep value decisions about making or enabling choices, 
> just by adopting "availability" as a default, that's simply wrong. The 
> present situation involving interlanguage links is a perfect 
> illustration of that. Regardless of which interface approach we adopted, 
> the links were going to remain available, there was no thought that they 
> would be deleted or that feature eliminated. The question is how they 
> are going to be available, at what point we are going to present the 
> reader with the choice, and what mechanisms will be used to enable those 
> choices. Those are crucial questions to confront in our work, and they 
> apply to much more than just interlanguage links, important as those are.
>
>
>   

You are precisely accurate in terms of the reason why people
are so offended by the collapsing of interlanguage links, is
just because that is against our mission.

And that is just a minor way of going against our mission. I would
suggest nobody even encompass going more directly against that
mission.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen