On Tue, Aug 11, 2020 at 2:51 PM Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
There should be no 'collaborative and transformative work' done on this archive
Bulk uploads often entail collaboration or transformation as the uploads are organized, and as format issues and other considerations are worked through. If you want to enable uploads in a wiki context, I don't think you'll be able to (or want to!) get around that. :) That's part of the reason why I think the upload stage should be reserved for the point when licensing issues have in fact been resolved.
Erik, to your point — yes, this should also include old books that are in the process of relicensing, if those books have been uploaded to us by or on behalf of a license holder, and we are confirming that and working through related steps.
Is your assumption that the set of works that would be so archived is closer to being usable in Wikimedia projects (i.e. freely licensed) than any other set of works? If so, I still don't see how this is true. The decision to apply a license like NC is often a very intentional one, difficult to reverse, as the many discussions about this license have shown. In contrast, the decision to just use conventional copyright is often not a decision at all. In many cases, a copyrighted work may be "free for the asking".
It helps our work to have a persistent public place (not randomly deleted from time to time!) to discuss determining their license status, getting formal and informal license clearance, discussions with the contributors to refine their understanding of options, debates among ourselves about whether a license grant was sufficient and how to obtain more clarity, &c.
I agree with that! I think it could be done e.g. in a WikiBase instance which focuses on tracking URLs of valuable educational content rather than files. This would have some advantages:
- it is inclusive of material under all licensing terms, in any repository - it is inclusive of material that is not trivially downloadable or that is in formats that require conversion or transformation - it can hold URLs to collections alongside URLs to single files
It could be scoped to track material that is associated with plausible efforts to liberate it for use in Wikimedia, e.g., organized under WikiProjects.
And what of archiving? As I said before, a partner like the Internet Archive would IMO be well-suited to help archive URLs that permit it, without requiring the manual labor of managing copies in some kind of pseudo-wiki.
Fundamentally I just don't buy the apparent premise that amassing NC type content, or content under your "any legal way but not yet free" formulation, actually helps in the goal of content liberation. Is that stuff worth archiving? Sure, but Wikimedia is not the IA.
I do appreciate the discussion, and the WikiNotYetFree proposal (even if I disagree with its premise for the same reasons). If there's interest in the idea formulated above, of a wiki that truly is a clearinghouse and not an archive of nonfree content, I would be happy to try to help articulate it further.
Warmly, Erik