Dear ladies and gentlemen,
[Note:Mr. Christoph Hager asked us to place our apologies and questions here:]
we have found out, that we have been listed as a live mirror and therefore have been
blocked.
We truly apologize for doing it the wrong way - we were unaware of the issue concerning
"live mirrors" in 2005, when we
implemented our solution.
Therefore we really are sorry for the challenges we may have caused you, as we were
unaware of the "live mirror" issue when we
first implemented (autumn 2005) our encyclopedia, that was also using Wikipedia-contents.
We really, really thought, that we
were fully compliant.
So to our knowledge the GFDL compliance was perfect (now it is not, as we've quickly
turned off all links) and we were doing
everything right, but we did not know, that we were not allowed to "parse"
articles live, that we did not deem appropiate for
our audience, but were linked in other articles we had saved on our server.
We would love to solve this issue with you and would ask you for a contact, with whom we
may sort out the best possible solution
for you and us. Of course, we would also delete the entire thing and start building an own
solution, if you ask us to.
At the moment, we think a Wikimedia-conform solution might be the following:
- we would check the articles concerning our project (
koordinaten.de/.net) and save them
into an own database
- we assume at the moment, that this will be less than overall 1000 articles
- we would get changed or new articles once a month to avoid bringing unnecessary traffic
to your servers and would clearly
state the necessary details for the GFDL-rules (as we did) and that our versions may be
outdated in comparison the the Wikipedia
- we will deny (already did) the robots to follow and therefore check these pages
- we could get the articles in times you propose (if there are any less frequented times
on wikipedia...)
- we are not sure how to handle the image-issues - at the moment, we think it to be best,
if we would also cache them on our
server, but are not sure about the legal aspects here
- if possible, we would also deny the possibility to change articles on our version as
this function would best be linked to the
original Wikipedia-version
- any articles, that we did not cache but would have links to them in the cached articles
would be transferred by a link to
Wikipedia itself, though we would include a page, that makes the user aware of the
transfer
This way, we would avoid having to download the whole wikipedia files as proposed on some
pages about live mirrors and at the
same time, reduce any traffic for Wikipedia. But we could keep using the articles for our
audience as an information to our
site.
Also through the GFDL compliance we already followed since 2005 all users would be aware,
that the source for the articles is
Wikipedia and the respective author.
This way we would hope to reduce or avoid any harm for wikipedia, it's servers and the
people making this great portal what it
is today.
As we were sure in 2005, that we understood how to do it in compliance with your
informations, we now would like to ask for
support/a confirmation how to best do it.
As mentioned, we would also accept your denial of any use of Wikipedia contents, allthough
we would greatly appreciate your
acceptance of our apologies for the challenges we may have caused.
We really were unaware and the last thing we had in mind was to harm Wikipedia!
Best regards,
__
Samater Liban - Consulting - Heret Informatik Service
www.Koordinaten.net /
www.Koordinaten.de
Am Kühlen Grund 5 - 65835 Liederbach - Germany
T: +49-(0)700 - 56673462 - M: +49-(0)175 - 544 71 67