At present GFDL includes not only wikipedia articles but talk pages, user pages and WP pages. This is entirely necessary and accentuates the risk of libelous or defamatory (or just nasty) comments being duplicated on various mirrors throughout the web, beyond the reach of editors to delete them.
Since the product of wikipedia, the actual content, are articles and not talk pages, administrative pages, user pages etc can we do something to limit the GFDL to these pages specifically?
On 3/15/07, David Hanson behindtheateball@gmail.com wrote:
At present GFDL includes not only wikipedia articles but talk pages, user pages and WP pages. This is entirely necessary and accentuates the risk of libelous or defamatory (or just nasty) comments being duplicated on various mirrors throughout the web, beyond the reach of editors to delete them.
Since the product of wikipedia, the actual content, are articles and not talk pages, administrative pages, user pages etc can we do something to limit the GFDL to these pages specifically?
Are you saying that we should use a more restrictive license for the talk-pages? One that does not allow redistribution? Like, standard copyright? Even if this was feasible to do, I'd think that there would be vast opposition to it in the community. Wikipedia is free, every single part of it. When we contribute, we contribute free material. Anything else is unacceptable, even for the meta-pages.
I don't know about the rest of you, but this is the way I feel at least. And I think I'm not alone.
--Oskar
I agree with Oskar entirely.
What's more, with caching and archiving services doing their stuff regardless of copyright status, your proposal wouldn't make much, if any, difference.
On 15/03/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/15/07, David Hanson behindtheateball@gmail.com wrote:
At present GFDL includes not only wikipedia articles but talk pages, user pages and WP pages. This is entirely necessary and accentuates the risk of libelous or defamatory (or just nasty) comments being duplicated on
various
mirrors throughout the web, beyond the reach of editors to delete them.
Since the product of wikipedia, the actual content, are articles and not talk pages, administrative pages, user pages etc can we do something to limit the GFDL to these pages specifically?
Are you saying that we should use a more restrictive license for the talk-pages? One that does not allow redistribution? Like, standard copyright? Even if this was feasible to do, I'd think that there would be vast opposition to it in the community. Wikipedia is free, every single part of it. When we contribute, we contribute free material. Anything else is unacceptable, even for the meta-pages.
I don't know about the rest of you, but this is the way I feel at least. And I think I'm not alone.
--Oskar
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On 3/15/07, David Hanson behindtheateball@gmail.com wrote:
At present GFDL includes not only wikipedia articles but talk pages, user pages and WP pages. This is entirely necessary and accentuates the risk of libelous or defamatory (or just nasty) comments being duplicated on various mirrors throughout the web, beyond the reach of editors to delete them.
Since the product of wikipedia, the actual content, are articles and not talk pages, administrative pages, user pages etc can we do something to limit the GFDL to these pages specifically?
That wouldn't be very practical. It happens quite often that content is moved between namespaces. For example, articles about Wikipedia are sometimes moved from the main to the Wikipedia: namespace when they are seen as not notable enough for a general audience, but interesting enough for Wikipedians to keep. Users also sometimes work collaboratively on a draft in user space. All these useful cross-namespace moves become license violations when different namespaces use different licenses. Even worse, transclusion of some namespaces in others would have to be disabled, or the result will be a confusing mixed-license mess.
Note that most reasonable mirrors do not mirror non-mainspace contents anyway, and the recommended downloads only give them what they need for the mainspace.
Kusma
On 3/15/07, Kusma kusma.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
That wouldn't be very practical. It happens quite often that content is moved between namespaces. For example, articles about Wikipedia are sometimes moved from the main to the Wikipedia: namespace when they are seen as not notable enough for a general audience, but interesting enough for Wikipedians to keep. Users also sometimes work collaboratively on a draft in user space. All these useful cross-namespace moves become license violations when different namespaces use different licenses. Even worse, transclusion of some namespaces in others would have to be disabled, or the result will be a confusing mixed-license mess.
That's the most important reason why all content must be published under the GFDL.
I take the view that the distinction drawn between "the encyclopaedia" and "the other stuff" is really an artificial one anyway. Wikipedia is not merely a sum of the article namespace; rather, it's content plus a record of how that content was created.
On 14/03/07, David Hanson behindtheateball@gmail.com wrote:
At present GFDL includes not only wikipedia articles but talk pages, user pages and WP pages. This is entirely necessary and accentuates the risk of libelous or defamatory (or just nasty) comments being duplicated on various mirrors throughout the web, beyond the reach of editors to delete them.
Since the product of wikipedia, the actual content, are articles and not talk pages, administrative pages, user pages etc can we do something to limit the GFDL to these pages specifically?
The primary problem is that we can't relicense the pre-existing text - effectively we'd have to wipe over and start again. Having two different copyright licenses on different namespaces is potentially just more of a headache than it's wirthm too.
What we *can* do is offer article-only/article-and-image-only dumps - purged of all non-mainspace pages- and make these the easier option for setting up a mirror. As it is very few mirrors include non-article pages, so I assume something like this is either happening or is happening simply through convenience...
The primary problem is that we can't relicense the pre-existing text - effectively we'd have to wipe over and start again.
That's definitely the biggest problem. Moving things between namespaces can be got around, but the fact that all the pre-existing text is already released under one license makes it pretty much impossible to change any of our licensing arrangements.