[Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork

[Erik Moeller]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 10:07 AM, Dirk Franke
<dirkingofranke at googlemail.com> wrote:
> And people who talked privately about a fork for some time, start to think
> and say it loud.

Thanks for the update, Dirk. I think it's good that people are
seriously discussing what it would mean to fork and how it would be
done. Forking the project if WMF policies or decisions are considered
unacceptable is one of the fundamental ways in which Wikimedia
projects are different from most of the web; it's a key freedom, one
which should be exercised judiciously but which should be preserved
and protected nonetheless.

With that said, I also think it's important to remember that Sue has
explicitly affirmed that the development of any technical solution
would be done in partnership with the community, including people
who've expressed strong opposition to what's been discussed to date.
[1]

The vote in German Wikipedia, and most of the discussions to date,
have focused on the specific ideas and mock-ups that were presented as
part of the referendum. But as Sue has made clear, those ideas and
mock-ups are just that, and the Board resolution creates room for
different ideas as well, ranging from the simple (disabling/blurring
all images) to the complex (like a category-based filtering system).

Some of these ideas are explored here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Next_steps/en#Potential_models_for_hiding_images

Is there a similar brainstorming page on dewiki already? If not, would
you be interested in organizing some community discussion on whether
there are solutions within the scope of the resolution that the dewiki
community would find acceptable, or whether the prevailing view is
that the resolution itself should be scrapped altogether?

Thanks,
Erik

[1]http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-October/069472.html