On Sun, Feb 5, 2017 at 10:15 AM, Yair Rand <yyairr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> "Wikipedia is something special. It is like a library or a public park. It > is like a temple for the mind. It is a place we can all go to think, to > learn, to share our knowledge with others." > The point is, you are implicitly assuming that a public park or a library, the right to have "a temple for the mind", "a place we can all go to think, to learn, to share our knowledge with others", are thing that are not inherently political. You're simply wrong. A public library is a very political entity, and it's modern one for several reason: access to knowledge for everyone is something governments/elites did not want for a very long time. A true policy of the commons is the same thing. If you want to bet, we could wait for a year or two and see what the Trump administrations will do with federal funds for public libraries and public parks... Reactionary governments often defund public commons, because reactionary policy is to privatize (I'm cutting things with the axe here, please bear with me). Also, "we can go all to think, learn and share". Think about that word, *all*: it's not granted, and it's there for a reason. I often think about Dorothy Counts [1], and how much did it take for her, at 15, to go to school and getting harassed by her whole community for days. Just for going to a white school. And this is just one of the countless examples in which humans (thus, politics) didn't believe in a place where "we can go all to think, learn and share". I just believe that thinking our values and mission are apolitical is at best naive, at worst wrong and dangerous. Aubrey [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Counts. See also https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo/1957/world-press-photo-year/douglas-martin _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
