[Wikimedia-l] Affiliations Committee 2012 Annual Report

[Bence Damokos]

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 6:56 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> Gregory Varnum, 12/05/2013 19:47:
>
>  Nemo,
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean by a single person's POV.  Are you referring
>> to Stephen?
>>
>
> No. It doesn't matter who that is.

Geoff speaking and signing his post as General Counsel is definitely
carrying weight. Due to their "initial" nature, it was necessary to see
whether it would change based on discussions, but if only by nature of the
time elapsed and the repeated commitments from the legal department
confirming that these guidelines are operative make them policy.

>
>
>
>> While it is true that WMF Legal did the final writing of some guidelines
>> - a few points:
>> 1. They are guidelines - and AffCom has flexibility if it so desires and
>> finds necessary.
>> 2. They were written based on feedback from non-AffCom folks on talk
>> pages, Milan, and elsewhere - as well as based on input from AffCom.
>> 3. Naming guidelines exist for chapters and other entities - this is
>> nothing new.
>> 4. A final summarizing guideline or document being written by one person
>> with unique skills, such as legal, is also nothing new, unusual, or implies
>> that only their views are represented - that's just not true.
>>
>
> A talk page post is not a "final summarizing guideline". At best, it
> should be moved to main namespace and tagged properly (explaining how it
> got to guideline status etc. etc.).


Indeed, I think now we can consider those "initial thoughts" to have stuck
and as general clean up we will be incorporating it by reference or
directly into the guidelines on setting up thematic organizations. (It is
already included in the user group guidelnies by reference, but a cleaned
up version on a separate page or a summary would be the way to go).

Thanks,
Bence