On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Do I understand correctly that those who do not just download our non-mainspace (you know the real wikipedia stuff of articles like of an encyclopaedic value), do it with full knowledge that isn't really encyclopaedic matter, but download it anyway?
They have the option to download only articles. We can't guess their understanding or motivation. I think that they are just grabbing the first thing that works is the more obvious theory. ;)
On the gripping hand the arguments I have heard against adjusting the licencing of the non-mainspace pages has been on the basis of not providing free web-hosting, so everything has to be copy-left.
Somehow I don't think that equation passes the sniff test.
Particularly in the light of the fact that the MediaWiki help-pages are already definitely *not* copy-left, but decisively PD.
You're free to make your contributions more liberally licensed, just not less.
If you want to post information about yourself under a restrictive license, there are lots of low to no cost web hosts that allow it. So long as you're a contributor the projects are very permissive about making your userpage just a link to your website, as far as I've seen.
Beyond the "avoiding free webhosting", keeping the project spaces freely licensed contributes to keeping freely licensed content part of the culture and superordinate goal.
In any case, if nazi-pedia is really trying to make it look like you're a contributor there, they could do amply well without copying your Wikipedia userpage. :) Licensing is not the right tool to use against fraud. It's a wrong fit.