Elisabeth Bauer wrote:
The bylaws say otherwise at the moment - they give the
board of
trustees the right to interfere with the projects. And, giving you the
same answer Jimmy gave the German wikipedians: this may be fine now,
but we have to think of the situation in 20 years. Even in 20 years,
it should be guaranteed that the welsh wikipedians decide over the
policies of the welsh wikipedia, the wikibookists over wikibooks and
so on.
The wikimedia foundation is for keeping the servers running,
collecting funds and defending the projects against legal threats, but
not for enforcing rules (or a however defined code of ethics) upon all
projects.
I'm not sure how you can really get an absolute guarantee of that
though. If the Wikimedia Foundation owns the servers, it has de facto
control over everything, whether the bylaws say so or not. And even if
the bylaws set up some sort of "self-government" for sub-Wikimedia
entities, the bylaws can always be changed by a future Board of
Trustees. Unless each Wikipedia is to purchase and administer its own
servers, and choose its own name (other than "Wikipedia"), I don't see
how we can have projects not be subordinate, at least in a legal and
technical sense, to the main organization.
-Mark