Empowerment
Our mission includes empowering people around the world.
Goals
How are we empowering readers and participants, how are we working against this goal, and how can we improve the extent to which people touched by Wikimedia are empowered -- to learn, teach, create and explore?
Topics
- Creation - how are people being empowered to create by Wikimedia in ways they were not before? Are we providing tools for creation and re-creation not elsewhere freely available?
- Wikipedia wasn't the first wiki. But definitely Wikipedia popularized the concept and empowered internet users - "anyone can edit" - to create articles, to add or modify articles, to edit articles, ...
- Collaboration - how are people empowered to collaborate with others, to build on existing work, to discuss and review and interact?
- The first hint is the clearly visible blue "edit" link preceding each article section
- The second hint to collaborate is the talk page that accompanies any article page
- Publication - how are people empowered to publish their work and the work of others, to disseminate it beyond its current boundaries, to develop their own publishing enterprises? Our license was chosen to explicitly support commercial use and reuse : are we truly empowering people to build on this foundation?
- No, not at all. We protect our trademarks, we require linking back to the original article, we require linking to the page history ...
- Example: Wikibooks contributors still feel burned from an episode in which a core member of their community was chastised for attempting to arrange POD of wikibooks works through Lulu. This was partly due to process and misunderstandings, but there has been no explicit effort by {the community at large, the Foundation, active members of other projects who have successfully published and reused wikimedia work} to remedy the situation. As recently as a month ago, a foundation-l thread suggested that these contributors were still interested in pursuing such reuse, and still felt restrained from doing so. Sj 14:38, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
- Teaching - how are people encouraged to share what they know, and how are they discouraged from doing so? Policies on OR, implications for sharing knowledge that has no obvious first-publisher, and ramifications for participants who have no access to other forms of creation or publication are all relevant.
- Teacher in general tend to discourage Wikipedia use by their students - they simply are clueless in dealing or coping with - please note carefully - peer reviewed material. They really haven't seen publicly reviewed material by true pears at all. "Learned journals" have the reputation for providing high quality "peer reviewed" material. (Please edit)