At my urging in IRC chat, this and the redirects from it are listed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possible_copyright_infringements#Mar… .
A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to
include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.
The company has a major financial incentive to take us to court bcause we are competitors.
Our normal transformative use fair use argument doesn't exist because they are an
encyclopedia and so are we, so fair use is far, far tougher to argue. We also lose our
unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this
case.
They would take us to court and this is free ammunition forthem to use to do it. Whether
they do it before a print edition or after, to do the greatest possible harm by requiring
all copies to be recalled or destroyed, is not knowable by us.
We must not use the selection of articles made by another encyclopedia as a checklist for
articles we want. If individual Wikipedians do so, that's their problem but we must
not conspire with them to facilitate it.
It's not a problem to do things like noting that it's common for encyclopedias to
use "lastname, firstname" form for names and add redirects of that sort for
every individual we have in the Wikipedia. It's not a problem to note that
encyclopedias often use the names of popes not preceded by the word pope and create
redirects for that. But it is a problem if a large subset is selected and systematically
worked on in this way. It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers
from a Wikipedia page to their site.
It was a good and helpful thought Timwi, but it does lots of potential harm and
shouldn't be done in this way. If you instead make a bot to create lastname, firstname
redirects, that would be useful and not a problem.
-----Original Message-----
From: Timwi
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 18:01:07 +0000
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles
It is now official! :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Columbia_Encyclopedia_article_titles
If you have a minute of spare time, please take a peek at some of the
links. If Wikipedia articles exist on some of the topics, create
redirects to them and remove them from the list.
If you are certain that a particular topic does not have a corresponding
Wikipedia article, it would probably make sense to mark them somehow -
perhaps move them to the bottom of the page into an extra section.
Thanks!
Timwi
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