Proposed prohibition of local uploads and deletion of non-free-licence working documents of Wikimedia events - Wikimania-l

29 May 2013

Dear Wikimania community,

There are currently two discussions on Meta which will have a fundamental
impact on the technical logistics of all future Wikimania bids.

As many of you would know, working documents of Wikimania bids, such as
letters of support and venue information, are conventionally uploaded to
Meta locally because they don't come with a Commons-compatible free
licence. However, currently there's no explicit "exemption doctrine policy"
on Meta, so two discussions are ongoing, with the aim of deleting all
Wikimania-related non-free files which have been uploaded in the past
years[1], and to ban future uploads of non-free media to Meta including
Wikimedia events' working documents[2].

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Requests_for_deletion#All_files_in_Cate…
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#Restrict_or_abolish_local_file_up…

Since this would mean future Wikimania bids may not include copies of
third-party working documents on Meta, these proposals will change the
logistics of Wikimania bids completely. I therefore urge all of you to
scrutinise the proposed changes and comment as appropriate.

Deryck
WM2013 local team

PS. To those of you who also run chapters: the proposed changes will mean
that chapter financial statements may not be uploaded to / will be deleted
from WMF-hosted wikis since they're have an implicit no-derivative
requirement.