----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Ehrenberg" littledanehren@yahoo.com To: "Discussion list for English-language Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2003 10:00 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [Wikitech-l] Re: Update to gfdl copyright notice needed
(Doesn't LittleDan state that his parents know about
his >work on Wikipedia?)
Yes, but an initial requirement for parental permission/knowledge might have detered me. Besides, restricting minors, even if for legal reasons, detracts from the whole wiki-ness of Wikipedia.
the wikiness of wikipedia is already limited by the need to make the copyright of user contributions as pure as possible. There is a certain frenzy regarding dealing with copyright violations. I think that is very unwiki, but I understand that many contributors have a sense of ownership with Wikipedia, that is why they are so concerned (IMHO) about copyright "violations". This is understandable and admirable in a certain way.
However, people violate copyright all the time. It is not a big deal, but here everyone is concerned with the purity of Wikipedia's text because there is is this belief that other people will copy it, use it etc. I am not so convinced that it will happen much for a lot of reasons. This minor issue is one of them.
What if we told all those people who have spent all that time that they can just forget redistributing Wikipedia because no one knows how many minors have contributed or how many of the users might have copied text from somewhere and they did not discover it?
For that reason alone this discussion is important.
Having said that, I think it was clear from my proposed Submission Guidelines that someone can just post anonymously. Also they can lie, we cannot prevent children from posting to WIkipedia, it is up to them and their parents to deal with it. We just want to raise it as an issue so everyone gets fair notice. THAT IS very in tune with wiki-ness; we can keep allowing contributors and well, if they sue Wikimedia, it will definitely get us more press and more users. Isn't that the point? Letting people know there could be a problem might get them to contribute in a way that doesn't cause problems, that is what wiki contribution is all about.
Alex756