[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[John Vandenberg]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
>> Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
>> in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
>> no educational or informational value.
>
> I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most
> information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and
> materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or
> information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of
> Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as
> possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music.

Just in case anyone is seriously considering nixing any project which
is not "educational", let me point out that Wikisource does have a lot
of educational content.  e.g.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/EB1911
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/DNB
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Copyright_law

> Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation
> feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]?

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover
[2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure

or:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catullus_16

(this was/is our 32st most viewed page)

perhaps we should also remove the translation from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

--
John Vandenberg