[Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant in the room

[Marc A. Pelletier]

On 11/20/2013 01:13 PM, Michael Snow wrote:
> My general point is that opportunities for automation are best
> considered with our overall mission in mind, not just the speed or
> efficiency of a particular workflow. In certain situations, automation
> that creates more work rather than removing it (such as by identifying
> potential tasks and feeding them to editors) might be preferable. And
> some of our tools already use such an approach, which is a good thing.

That's an interesting approach, but I'm not sure how constructive it is
in the long run.  I suppose it depends greatly on whether one considers
our mission to be 'building an encyclopedia to share in the sum[...]' or
'having an encyclopedia to share in the sum[...]' (I'm not sure if I
make the subtle distinction here clear).

Perhaps another way of putting it is to ask whether the
encyclopedia-building community is the means or the ends.  To my eyes,
having "more contributors" is not valuable unless it has "better
encyclopedia" as a direct consequence.

-- Marc