On 9/28/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/28/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/27/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Close on 50% of the images on en are non free. Text on the other hand? A few percent maybe.
Maybe you mean "a few percent" of all articles contain unfree exerpts of a larger published work... I could stomach that.
But saying "a few percent" of all article text is unfree... that seems excessive, and hopefully incorrect.
Well, it depends on what we're looking at, but I assume most articles contain at the very least quotations under copyright. I would be surprised if the absolute number of articles with copyrighted text in them is only a few percent. I would not be surprised if the overall proportion of copyrighted text in Wikipedia, however, is a few percent - that seems about right. You can't write a proper, comprehensive encyclopaedia article without quoting someone (be it a historian, the article's subject, etc.), unless you're intentionally going out of your way to make life difficult for yourself and your readership.
I think this is untrue in many subject areas; in practice, no quotes are needed for most technical articles and many popular culture articles. They should be more common in history and so forth.
I don't mean to overemphasize the use of fair-use quotes in the encyclopedia; I try to be realistic about it. My point is that whatever that use is, it is enthusiastically embraced as necessary and proper.
My derived point is that it's somewhat hypocritical to have a different stance regarding appropriate and carefully chosen fair-use images than for appropriate and carefully chosen fair-use text.
We would probably do better to have more of both, rather than less, as an Encyclopedia, for the Readers.