I support you there Fennec. I do not think bots should be used in such a way.
There is another thing bugging me with RamMan drive. Not only is it asking editors to do dual-licensing on his geographic article, but it is first asking that editors do it in a more general way.
Whether we like it or not, the current license IS gfdl. And changing license under which we offer information should be a global decision, not the decision of one person only.
I understand well why RamMan is doing this, but indeed the geographic articles are special and the relationship/reusability with wikitravel is special as well. But I do think RamMan should only make a call for THOSE articles, not for the whole wikipedia articles.
Since I am at it, I regularly have editors asking me to fix my image license (I uploaded them before any tagging existed). While I understand the need to tag images extremely well (I worked on such policy on fr a year ago) it is bugging me that the spam message proposes me either to tag them gfdl, or to tag them fairuse under the USA law.
I do not think we should encourage tagging with a fairuse mention. And I do not think we should encourage a tag for a system existing only in US law.
If there were choices to make, could not be the spam propose gfdl and other free licenses ?
Ant
Hello. I'd just like to draw attention to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambota discussion about whether Ram-Man should be permitted to use rambotto send unsolicited bulk messages (soliciting participation in a"dual-licensing drive") to thousands of user-talk pages. The bot iscurrently blocked indefinitely, pending the resolution of this issue.Ram-Man seems to believe that an implicit community consens exists andapproves of his use of the bot in this fashion. Currently, he claimsto have "over 70% support" of users who responded to the message,although I believe this figure to be skewed by the "users whoresponded" part. I therefore would appreciate it if otherwiseuninterested individuals provide Ram-Man with a more concrete measureof the level of community support which exists regarding this message.Others have expressed concerns regarding the precedent which this setsfor distribution of unsolicited user-talk messages, and suggest that amore concrete policy be formed to deal with this form of userpagespam.
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--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Whether we like it or not, the current license IS gfdl. And changing license under which we offer information should be a global decision, not the decision of one person only.
On the contrary. Each person's edits belong to them, not Wikipedia, so the decision of how to license them (in addition to the gfdl license applied on submission) is solely theirs.
Mark
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