I'm forwarding my message to the wikitech list because I think this might be of more
interest to you people than wikipedians at large.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Becker <mbecker(a)jumpingjackweb.com>
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:43:09 -0400
Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] defining Free Encyclopedia
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Personally, the *free*ness of wikipedia concerns me a lot too. This was my first concern
when I first submitted the image to vfd. I personally had NO political or censorship
concerns. That is pretty obvious if you check out the history of the Clitoris article. In
any case, I'm also VERY concerned about the effects of using copyrighted material in
the wikipedia will have on it's freeness. As I see it now though, as long as there is
a hard line drawn between copyrighted and GPL material, it should be easy enough to
remove. If we don't facilitate the easy removal of this content, the wikipedia is no
longer free, and we have failed in our goals IMHO. At the moment, the lines drawn between
free and non-free content in the wikipedia are very thin. This is a line drawn by the
users, and we are essentially trusting people who upload these non-free images/content to
make sure it is easy to distinguish their added content as non-free. I'm not very
comfortable with this. IMNSHO, it wo uld be better if we had some sort of hard line drawn
on the software side of things between free and non-free content so that it can easily be
removed in the future.
On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:38:12 -0400, Anthony DiPierro <anthonydipierro(a)hotmail.com>
wrote:
Well, the
email has been sent already, so why don't we see what they
reply with? I hardly see how any kind of permission (or refusal) from AP
could [be] bad for us: It clarifies our options, but we don't /have/ to
avail of them if we don't want.
First of all, refusal wouldn't clarify our options. If the image is being
used in a way which is fair use, then it's fair use regardless of whether or
not AP has refused to allow us to use it. Secondly, clarifying our options
doesn't resolve the dispute. Having options is exactly the reason we have
the dispute. If we didn't have any options, we wouldn't have a dispute.
Besides, the root of the problem _as I perceive
it_ is that this is a
proxy political dispute:
The very people pushing hardest against that
picture's use and for its
removal on copyright grounds made edits that would seem to hint at a
political affiliation which might make them feel uncomfortable about
this picture. (That's not a judgment, just an observation.)
That's certainly not the *root* of the problem. It may be why the problem
came to light in this particular instance, but the root of the problem has
nothing to do with these details. The root of the problem is that we
haven't decided what it means to be a *free* encyclopedia. This needs to be
resolved in a way which provides objective criteria for inclusion. We've
started along on that path, but we've still got a long way to go.
Incidently, this is somewhat analogous to the problem of deciding what it
means to be a free *encyclopedia*. We're farther along with that
definition, and have already come up with somewhat objective criteria at
[[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]]. But we still resort to
[[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]], still have ongoing inclusion disputes, and
people still abuse the abiguities for political purposes.
My motivation was to settle the copyright
situation, yay or nay, so
people can THEN deal with it.
If we first wanted to wait till we had agreement,
we'd wait till
kingdom come.
I don't think that's at all the case. I'm probably one of the biggest
objectors to having non-free images on Wikipedia, and I've come a long way
toward accepting some non-GFDL images as being "free enough". I actually
think the majority of the problem is a lack of understanding rather than
diametrically opposed viewpoints.
I think we can come to an agreement on what it means to be a *free*
*encyclopedia*. It would probably speed things up to organize the effort,
and that's why I proposed as part of my platform when I ran for the
Wikimedia board to start a committee with the task of defining those terms
by community consensus (i.e. what the term means to us). I think a
definition of the term "Free Encyclopedia", similar in concept and spirit to
the GNU Project's definition of Free Software (see
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), formed by the community as a
whole and ratified by the board, would *be* an agreement, and I think it
could be reached. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
Thanks and regards,
Jens Ropers
Anthony
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