Does a species list meet the threshold of originality? I'm dubious that it qualifies for copyright protection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
I think it may be appropriate for a Wikipedia project. The only object that occurs to me is notability, but in my opinion, a location specific plant list, if published, is notable.
-- Walter Siegmund
On Feb 24, 2011, at 10:21 AM, Michael Snow wrote:
On 2/24/2011 10:07 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:
To take an example from my activity, much of my plant photography is motivated by checking off a published list of the thousand-odd taxa recorded in the Spring Mountains west of Las Vegas. I've been doing penciled annotation of the physical list, partly because I don't want to have to fight over having a WP or commons version of the list. It would be very convenient to have it in commons to track what pics we are still looking for, and be able to point my fellow Vegas plant people at it, but I just know that there would be a nonstop parade of busybodies arguing that the list (full of redlinks ZOMG!) is inappropriate for commons.
Actually, the real problem is that presumably the list is not freely licensed. Even though your annotation of it makes a pretty good case for transformative fair use, that doesn't help you with Commons policy. Maybe there's too strong of an expectation that Commons is only for finished products and not intended to be a workspace, notwithstanding that it is still a wiki.
--Michael Snow
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