This will be a rather long e-mail and probably boring to many. I would like to know two things:
1. As I was reading an article about the murder of Kitty Genovese, I encountered a term called "Prosocial behavior". This was, supposedly, different from altruism in the sense that it was the very act of doing good - unless I misunderstood it wrong.
Anyhow, I wanted to check this on Wiki, but couldn't find any info. I then googled the term using quotes and found 117,000 hits and another 23,000 for the British spelling for "behavior" - with an "u". That makes it 140,000 hits for the exact term -- and not the words by themselves.
I decided to create a stub until I came across an article that described the term in a very detailed matter. At the end of the article, it said:
"This paper was developed by a student taking a Philanthropic Studies course taught at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. It is offered by Learning To Give and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. This page may be reproduced for educational, noncommercial uses only, all other rights reserved."
I then thought of Wiki that is using articles from Britannica prior to 1911, or so, but I understood the difference being that the material released by Britannica was released without any copyrights reservations, whereas this article did reserve their copyrights. However, this doesn't seem to violate anything on Wiki per se, because Wiki qualifies as both non-commercial and educational -- however, other sites that mirror Wiki and are commercial (Answers, etc), do not qualify to those terms.
To my ears, this sounds as a dilemma. Can we publish material that is restricted as non-commercial, but which will be made "commercial" by other mirror sites, such as Answers? I know that certain photos are uploaded on Wiki and which have similar restrictions on them as this one.
2. Another thing that I would like to know, and which relates to this case, is whether we can credit the article to the author who wrote it. I know this is an unusual procedure, but think of the benefits: it could encourage great editors, who may want to have their work publicized, to make their great work available on Wiki! It would probably come with troubles, too, as many others would also want recognition for their articles, but perhaps exceptions can be made? I know, for instance, that on E. Britannica, they have articles written by different people which sometimes are being credited at the end of the article.
Any thoughts?
User:Anittas
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