On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
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".
Having talked to some of the less brillant people trying to set up mirrors I think you may be attributing too much of the outcome to intent if you're attributing any of the outcome to intent at all. ;)
We do have quite a few recourses against mirrors who behave unreasonably. For example, we could hold them to the strict letter of their licensing requirements, so frequently followed sloppily.
It would probably be helpful if we more explicitly discouraged mirror sites from copying the user-pages. I think the download page currently says "you probably don't want this one" but we don't really ask them not to. I think we'd rather make it clear what we do and don't want before we can decide that someone is probably being malevolent.
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.
I very much did notice you said specifically copyleft... which resulted in the very first sentence. "You're free to make your contributions more liberally licensed, just not less." If you want to say your userpage is also available as public domain you're welcome to do so.
So the actual requirement is that you must offer your userpage contributions under the GFDL but you can also publish those contributions under any number of additional licenses.
So you're perfectly free to moot the copyleft on your own stuff by offering non-copyleft free license terms... which is why I took your commentary to be free licensing vs not, rather than say much about copyleft.
[snip]
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.
Sure, it's a restriction that you must at least offer a particular license over your userpages. But its a restriction which improves consistency, discourages particular kinds of wasteful discussion (zomg, you can't copy from my user page! yours is incompatibly licensed!), and which generally removes a flexibility which has little relevance to our mission. (though perhaps more relevance to someone looking for a free webhost! :) )
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.
Communication accomplished well results in an understand of both the direct and the implied. .... But here I was just guessing since I wasn't quite sure where you were going.
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.
Gladly. .. and in any case.. The concern that Nazipedia can copy our userpages in a way that makes our contributors look like nazipedia-supporters is a valid concern... it's just not not one which I think we can or should address with licensing. Sorry for jumping ahead of you incorrectly.