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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28230 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Yes and no. You don't need to keep the WMF to keep Wikipedia - not even legally, because Wikipedia's content is CC-BY-SA and thus anyone with the money to handle the load can make a WP mirror.

It would be hard to get people to use a new, mirrored version of Wikipedia while the Wikimedia Foundation exists.

Yes, but 2rafa was saying the WMF would get bailed out if it somehow did go bankrupt.

I'm saying that in that specific highly-unlikely situation the existence of the mirrors would avoid the need for that.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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