On 9/28/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/28/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/28/07, Charlotte Webb
<charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 9/27/07, geni <geniice(a)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.
Haha, FA/GA reviewers these days are pretty strict about quoting critics in
popular culture articles; in fact, I suspect the vast bulk of our unfree
content, both text and images, is concentrated in this category.
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.
Yes. Unfortunately some people have gone overboard with the images; I'm by
no means a "make everything free!" kind of guy, but sometimes seeing pop
culture articles full of unnecessary imagery makes me wonder if we really
need all this.
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.
Indeed it is.
We would probably do better to have more of both, rather than less, as
an Encyclopedia, for the Readers.
The most important thing is to use them as necessary and appropriate; as far
as possible, we must avoid any less (which harms the encyclopaedia) and any
more (which harms the free nature of our encyclopaedia).
Johnleemk