Gregory Maxwell wrote:
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. ;)
Who says we can't guess? And why do you follow that with what is palpalby just your personal guess?
I don't think it follows Ochams Razor to assume that people in search of profit would make a special exception in the case of Wikipedia and act in a directly naîve way. That is simply asking too much from credulity; even if I know some net-rippers-off can be astoundingly stupid. There can be a presumption that most of them do one or the other, but assuming they do the naïve choice by default, is "the most ridiculous thing I ever heard".
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.
I think you missed the part where I was asking *specifically* about _copy-left_ and *not* "freely licenced". No biggie, easy to miss.
Then again, maybe the situation is more nuanced, and the question is ont really about less or more "free" but about the precise licence, where people can even disagree about which licence is the most "free". I certainly can consider many "copy-left" licences to be "encumbered" in certain specific manners, and still wrap my head around those peoples mindset that contend that going whole-hog PD is letting downstream users hobble the content that is derivative later.
The fact is that choosing any specific licence as a requirement or even choosing some minimum which has to be compatible with the chosen licence for non "content" pages, does constitute a restriction; though arguendo a restriction against allowing restriction.
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.
Well, of course here you are extrapolating that something that I said a while ago, was a hidden reference in a post that did not explicitly not reference it at all. Nicely done.
Hand on my heart, I didn't even think about the Nazipedia thing in talking about userspace licencing this time. I in fact didn't think about this at all in personal terms; I was genuinely trying to explore the real licencing landscape we have to work with, not just you and me, but all of our contributors. Take that as you will, believe it or not.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen