[WikiEN-l] Non-commercial only and By Permission Only Images to be

[Andrew Gray]

On 27/11/05, Mike Finucane <mike_finucane at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its based
> on providing source material for commercial companies.
>
> Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your
> explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my
> part.

Basic problem: Wikipedia has a goal of producing an encylopedia. Not
an encyclopedia limited only to people with Internet access - though
internet access is certainly booming - but an encyclopedia accessible
through other means. The long-term goal of this is, of course, the
mythical Printed Version - it's still in the air as to whether this
will ever be successful, but we do try and keep it in mind.

But there's other options. In Germany, for example, there was a very
successful DVD distribution of the German-language wikipedia; it was
reformatted, put on DVD, and sold for  ten euros(?). A large swathe of
this went back to the Foundation, a small quantity went to production
costs, and the residue went to the company that produced and
distributed them. Given the remarkable sales, I assume they made a
profit - asking on wikipedia-l would probably get some nice German to
explain this in better detail.

This was very popular, and no doubt a good thing for the project - but
it was a commercial venture, and had it contained non-commercial
material it wouldn't have been able to go ahead, because the company
was distributing it at more than cost. Any form of large-scale
distribution is likely to fall afoul of non-commercial clauses, at
some point, or at least to clash with them to such an extent that it
becomes impractical to do the distribution at anything but a loss.

Picking a random role, we'd love to provide, oh, a ten-dollar
encyclopedia to Indian schools. But if the choice is providing a
fifteen-dollar one with someone making a profit, or not being able to
afford to provide a ten-dollar one at cost, then fifteen starts to
sound pretty good.

Yes, this can be avoided by cleaning out with-permission and
limited-use images, but this itself provides another burden - the
labour to filter images. If we only accept images which are known to
be redistributable, then this presages that problem. We already do
this with text, and the reason for the strong wording is because we
recently tightened the standards on images.

(Personally, I feel we are more insistent on only-free-images than we
absolutely need to be, but...)

I hope that explains matters.

--
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk