Mike Finucane wrote:

I was going to enrich Wikipedia with a whole bunch of my images, but quite frankly, i dont want someone getting rich off my work. As such, I was intending to add creative commons no commercial use tags.

Then I come across this note from you:

"All images which are for non-commercial only use and by permission only

...

are not acceptable for Wikipedia and _will be deleted_. We have tolerated them for some time..."

Well fear not; you wont have to tolerate any of my images.

I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its based on providing source material for commercial companies.

Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my part.

I agree, the comment above was perhaps not as tactfully phrased as it could be. However, here's the reasoning behind the policy:

The goal of Wikipedia is "to create and provide a freely licensed and high quality encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in his or her own language".

In order to achieve that goal, Wikipedia is released under the GNU Free Documentation License: "free" in this case, means "free as in freedom". Summarized, it grants the right to redistribute and use material licensed under it in any way whatsoever, provided that the user preserves those rights for any other person. This is to ensure the widest possible use and distribution of the encyclopedia and the information within it.

This necessarily includes both for-profit and nonprofit uses. However, it does not mean that Wikipedia is a for-profit enterprise: indeed, the Wikimedia Foundation which supports it is an explicitly non-profit organization.

One of the things that you have the freedom to do with Wikipedia is to distribute it at no cost. However, allowing for-profit uses can make the information even more widely available; for example, it encourages people to make derivative works that build on it, or to make and sell hard copies to other people. However, none of these commercial uses prevent people from using the information for free; indeed, because the GFDL requires derivative works also to be licensed under the GFDL, it means that Wikipedia material, so long as it remains properly licensed under the GFDL, cannot have its freedom stripped away, even if it is included in a commercial derivative product.

For example, I would be quite within my rights to make copies of the articles from a commercially-purchased version of Wikipedia, and to give them, or indeed the whole encyclopedia, away for free. Any publisher asserting proprietary rights over Wikipedia material would be in breach of the GFDL, and would no longer have the right to use the material in the first place.

However, for this freedom to be useful, all the material in Wikipedia needs to be released under the GFDL; if there are parts that have more restrictive licences (for example, no commercial use), a commercial redistributor would have to go through the entire encyclopedia checking the licence of every single illustration. For this reason, Wikipedia's copyright rules state that every piece of material in Wikipedia must either be licenced under the GFDL, or fall under a legitimate exemption under copyright law (fair use, public domain, and so on).

This is the reason why we (regretfully) cannot accept images or other material under noncommercial-use-only licences. I understand your desire not to have other people get rich off your hard work. That is your right, and what you do with your own copyrighted material is your own business.

On the other hand, have you considered getting rich off ours?

Under the terms of the GFDL, you are quite welcome to do so; indeed, every contributor who has licensed their copyrighted material under the GFDL as part of Wikipedia has explicitly consented to this. Feel free to publish Wikipedia content as-is, or make commercial derivative works. The more widely you do this, the happier we will be. I hear that running Google ads on well-formatted copies of Wikipedia can be quite lucrative.

The only constraints are:

* that Wikipedia's collective copyright owners (its authors) insist that you do so under the terms of the GFDL, a copy of which you can find online here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_Li...

* that you do not copy Wikipedia pages from the Wikimedia servers in real-time, but instead work off an offline dump of the encyclopedia (as the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation does not have the resources for performing real-time page rendering for commercial enterprises)

-- Neil

On 27/11/05, Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:

I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its based on providing source material for commercial companies.

Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my part.

Basic problem: Wikipedia has a goal of producing an encylopedia. Not an encyclopedia limited only to people with Internet access - though internet access is certainly booming - but an encyclopedia accessible through other means. The long-term goal of this is, of course, the mythical Printed Version - it's still in the air as to whether this will ever be successful, but we do try and keep it in mind.

But there's other options. In Germany, for example, there was a very successful DVD distribution of the German-language wikipedia; it was reformatted, put on DVD, and sold for ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went back to the Foundation, a small quantity went to production costs, and the residue went to the company that produced and distributed them. Given the remarkable sales, I assume they made a profit - asking on wikipedia-l would probably get some nice German to explain this in better detail.

This was very popular, and no doubt a good thing for the project - but it was a commercial venture, and had it contained non-commercial material it wouldn't have been able to go ahead, because the company was distributing it at more than cost. Any form of large-scale distribution is likely to fall afoul of non-commercial clauses, at some point, or at least to clash with them to such an extent that it becomes impractical to do the distribution at anything but a loss.

Picking a random role, we'd love to provide, oh, a ten-dollar encyclopedia to Indian schools. But if the choice is providing a fifteen-dollar one with someone making a profit, or not being able to afford to provide a ten-dollar one at cost, then fifteen starts to sound pretty good.

Yes, this can be avoided by cleaning out with-permission and limited-use images, but this itself provides another burden - the labour to filter images. If we only accept images which are known to be redistributable, then this presages that problem. We already do this with text, and the reason for the strong wording is because we recently tightened the standards on images.

(Personally, I feel we are more insistent on only-free-images than we absolutely need to be, but...)

I hope that explains matters.

-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk