LittleDan writes: < reminds us of #14, not a place to dump public domain materials >
We shouldn't copy content from public domain sources, only the information from them.
Are you saying we shouldn't copy in information from public domain resources, and if so, why are you saying that?
Copying in public information has been very useful in building up the country articles--all of them are based on CIA information, with many of them supplemented with information from the State Department. There is no harm in that. Similarly, some but not all of the biographical entries come from public domain resources.
The problem with public domain sources is not that they are public domain, but that copyright has far extended any sort of reasonable limit and has turned into a system for controlling culture in perpetuity. In less ideological terms, what that means is that nearly everything post 1920s is *not* in the public domain, so the information you can glean from public domain resources typically predates that and so is often anachronistic to the point of being useless. This was the case with the information on [[Algeria]] from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which took me several hours to verify, and even then I got no more than a few paragraphs from it. Similarly, this was the problem with the various instructions someone was uploading about e.g. how to swim, as well as the recipes from the 1800s and early 1900s, referring to ingredients, methods, and measurements that often had not been in use for decades. Often the material in old biographical entries is laden with various cultural assumptions which are incorrect or downright embarassing.
Anyway, that is the background behind #14. It's not an absolute--or at least it shouldn't be--it's a warning: know what you're in for, and be prepared to do a lot of work.
kq
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That's not what I'm saying at all. We shouldn't copy public domain sources verbatim, but it's fine to copy the information. We're not just a dump site for words, only for ideas and information. In effect, it is the same as copywrited sources (except that we can copy the pictures from PD) but I see nothing wrong with that.
--LittleDan
--- koyaanis qatsi obchodnakorze@yahoo.com wrote:
LittleDan writes: < reminds us of #14, not a place to dump public domain materials >
We shouldn't copy content from public domain
sources,
only the information from them.
Are you saying we shouldn't copy in information from public domain resources, and if so, why are you saying that?
Copying in public information has been very useful in building up the country articles--all of them are based on CIA information, with many of them supplemented with information from the State Department. There is no harm in that. Similarly, some but not all of the biographical entries come from public domain resources.
The problem with public domain sources is not that they are public domain, but that copyright has far extended any sort of reasonable limit and has turned into a system for controlling culture in perpetuity.
In less ideological terms, what that means is that nearly everything post 1920s is *not* in the public domain, so the information you can glean from public domain resources typically predates that and so is often anachronistic to the point of being useless. This was the case with the information on [[Algeria]] from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which took me several hours to verify, and even then I got no more than a few paragraphs from it. Similarly, this was the problem with the various instructions someone was uploading about e.g. how to swim, as well as the recipes from the 1800s and early 1900s, referring to ingredients, methods, and measurements that often had not been in use for decades. Often the material in old biographical entries is laden with various cultural assumptions which are incorrect or downright embarassing.
Anyway, that is the background behind #14. It's not an absolute--or at least it shouldn't be--it's a warning: know what you're in for, and be prepared to do a lot of work.
kq
Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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