[Wikipedia-l] Re: The elections are on, but I cast a blank ballot!

[Anthere]

Gregory Maxwell a écrit:
 > On 6/29/05, Anthere 
<anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
 >
 >>I invite you to ask more questions here as well as on the appropriate
 >>candidate talk page if you feel it necessarily.
 >
 >
 > Well, in my reasoning I thought I was fairly clear that a lot of my
 > motivation was not based on a dislike of any of the candidates, but
 > more because two years is too long and because the editors, myself
 > included, are not being given quite enough information about
 > longer-term issues. I don't think 'questions' are a good solution to
 > the lack of information in the statements because we can not expect a
 > large enough audience to read the discussion.

Hi

I am sorry because I prepared a long answer... and my computer crashed 
:-((( I just can't feel the courage to do it all again. Sorry, I will 
make it quite short and probably very badly expressed. But I have to 
finish something quickly for wikimania tonight and will be away for the 
week end.


 > But since I'm being invited to ask questions, I'd like to ask a
 > question of all of the candidates; please pardon its length. Perhaps
 > this is more directed at Angela, since she mentioned the GFDL in her
 > statement, but I'd like to hear comments from all.
 >
 > What is your long-term position with respect to the GFDL, particularly
 > with respect to attribution?  Specifically, I've read the new CC-wiki
 > license and I'm very concerned that it creates a special right for
 > site operators (as opposed to first editors or publishers).  The
 > requirements of the CC-wiki are fairly similar to the not quite
 > GFDL-compatible attribution suggestions we make on our licensing page,
 > which is a big reason why I would even mention CC-wiki when talking
 > about Wikipedia licensing.
 >
 > Obviously Wikipedia could never be licensed as CC-wiki, and I have
 > great faith that the Free Software Foundation would not make unwise
 > changes to later versions of the GFDL... but I think that we would all
 > benefit from finding out exactly what changes the board would request
 > on our behalf.
 >
 > I feel confident that the community will not tolerate a change to the
 > licensing which grants Wikimedia special legal rights which would
 > inhibit the ability of the community to fork should the board somehow
 > lose its mind and act against what the community feels is its best
 > interest. This would require that the license not provide a special
 > attribution loophole that allows only attributing to the site where
 > the material was originally created.  I would like a direct assurance
 > that the board members will make no attempt to achieve such a change
 > for GFDL-licensed content on Wikipedia, Commons, or Wikibooks.
 >
 > I'd also like to know how each board member thinks the board to
 > incorporate community input into licensing-related discussions. I
 > believe that most people would agree that the use of our content could
 > be enhanced by some degree of carefully thought out change, but I know
 > I'd like to have the ability to provide input; for example, my point
 > on the non-negotiability of the legal ease of forking.
 >
 > Thanks!


I think it is correct to mostly direct these questions to Angela, as
indeed, they are not part of my platform, nor were last year.
I try to keep up with such matters as much as I can, but it certainly
is not the part I can best help, nor to be entirely fair with you, the 
part I am most interested in ;-) And given our time restraints, I truely 
think it is best that each board member try to focus on certain matters 
rather than to disperse himself in myriads of issues.

This said... I was confronted many times during the past year to the
issue of our license and the implication of reuse rules to respect.
I am not entirely sure I agree with Angela when she says she knows very
few mirrors compliants to the reattribution rule. Each time I had the
opportunity to do so for the reusers of the french content this year, I
mentionned amongst *requirements* the fact of doing a direct link to
the article or to the history of the article. And most to my surprise, 
most reusers absolutely followed this requirement.and link the article
itself. I do believe that at least for all electronic medias, it is 
possible to insist on this requirement and see it followed. It might be 
that we need to clarify for readers who the authors of an article are 
but I really would not support attributions being removed from editors 
to be given to the Foundation.

I mostly see a major issue with the GFDL with regards to all printed
work. It makes little sense to print the entire GFDL license, nor the 
entire list of authors, at the end of a book in which a little bit of 
gfdl content has been included. It makes no sense either when part of an 
article in included in a newspaper. No editor will ever follow that 
burden. This is a problem which needs to be solved and I would support 
having some of the requirements made simpler in these cases.

One thing I would like to insist upon is that there is no reason you
should feel you do not have the power to make things change yourself 
once you decide to do it. In the current discussions on licensing 
issues, two immediately pop up in my mind.

First is the issue of being allowed to reuse images from other
organisations, which will probably involve some consensus over the
license used in the end. For this, I invite you to read the very recent 
report by Submarine http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ESA_images.
This is an ongoing action lead by french and german editors. Please, 
feel free to get involved.

The second issue will probably become more and more proeminent in the 
future. It is simple. First, Commons seem to contain many images which 
are not free by our standards. Second, an image does not have 
necessarily the same status depending on the country. Perhaps editors 
such as Foenyx or Aurevilly could explain you better all this. And if 
you read french, I invite you to read Soufron's thoughts here : 
http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/plan.php3

Just this to say that when you say "I'd also like to know how each board 
member thinks the board to incorporate community input into 
licensing-related discussions." (with a word missing probably), I do not 
think the board "incorporate" community input into discussions, I think 
the community discussion drive many licensing issues. Maybe what is 
missing for you, is the knowledge of where the discussions take place or 
what initiatives are taken.

In any cases, you are correct to raise such an issue... and as Cimon 
recently told me, we need more public board meeting. I think it could be 
good to suggest one in fall to discuss the issue.

Sorry, I was probably very unclear. I am a bit tired.

ant