I for one had some discussions with Denny about licensing, and even if it hurt my feelings to say this (at least two of them) he was right. Facts can't be copyrighted and because of that CC0 is the natural choice for data in the database.

Still in Europe databases can be given a protection, and that can limit the access to the site. By using the CC0 license on the whole thing reuse are much easier.

Database protection and copyright is different issues and should not be mixed.

John

On Wed, Dec 2, 2015 at 12:43 AM, Markus Krötzsch <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:
[I continue cross-posting for this reply, but it would make sense to return the thread to the Wikidata list where it started, so as to avoid partial discussions happening in many places.]


Andreas,

On 27.11.2015 12:08, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
Gerard,

(I should note that my reply has nothing to do with what Gerard said, or to the high-level "quality" debate in this thread.)

[...]

Wikipedia content is considered a reliable source in Wikidata, and
Wikidata content is used as a reliable source by Google, where it
appears without any indication of its provenance.

 This prompted me to reply. I wanted to write an email that merely says:

"Really? Where did you get this from?" (Google using Wikidata content)

But then I read the rest ... so here you go ...


Your email mixes up many things and effects, some of which are important issues (e.g., the fact that VIAF is not a primary data source that should be used in citations). Many other of your remarks I find very hard to take serious, including but not limited to the following:

* A rather bizarre connection between licensing models and accountability (as if it would make content more credible if you are legally required to say that you found it on Wikipedia, or even give a list of user names and IPs who contributed)
* Some stories that I think you really just made up for the sake of argument (Denny alone has picked the Wikidata license? Google displays Wikidata content? Bing is fuelled by Wikimedia?)
* Some disjointed remarks about the history of capitalism
* The assertion that content is worse just because the author who created it used a bot for editing
* The idea that engineers want to build systems with bad data because they like the challenge of cleaning it up -- I mean: really! There is nothing one can even say to this.
* The complaint that Wikimedia employs too much engineering expertise and too little content expertise (when, in reality, it is a key principle of Wikimedia to keep out of content, and communities regularly complain WMF would still meddle too much).
* All those convincing arguments you make against open, anonymous editing because of it being easy to manipulate (I've heard this from Wikipedia critics ten years ago; wonder what became of them)
* And, finally, the culminating conspiracy theory of total control over political opinion, destroying all plurality by allowing only one viewpoint (not exactly what I observe on the Web ...) -- and topping this by blaming it all on the choice of a particular Creative Commons license for Wikidata! Really, you can't make this up.

Summing up: either this is an elaborate satire that tries to test how serious an answer you will get on a Wikimedia list, or you should *seriously* rethink what you wrote here, take back the things that are obviously bogus, and have a down-to-earth discussion about the topics you really care about (licenses and cyclic sourcing on Wikimedia projects, I guess; "capitalist companies controlling public media" should be discussed in another forum).

Kind regards,

Markus


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