On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:50 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
Another Wikipedia has a template on thousands of articles saying that they were copied from a copyrighted online encyclopedia and asks the editors not to enhance them. (I have to admit that i have limited understanding of this language, but i'm pretty sure that i got this one correctly.) Unlike in the first example, this is a very well established literary language with millions of educated writers.
One thing that i forgot to mention is that i often fix interwiki links in Wikipedias in other languages in cases of complicated interwiki conflicts which interwiki bots cannot resolve automatically. Such fixes must be made across all Wikipedias; if even one Wikipedia is left unmaintained, the interwiki bots cannot update the links in other Wikipedias. (Or worse, they may update them incorrectly.)
When i start fixing interwiki links in a group of related articles in different languages and see such a template on an article in one of the Wikipedias, what am i supposed to do? I AM NOT *FREE* TO EDIT IT - i may be infringing the copyright of the author of the original text. Of course i understand that fixing an interwiki link is a small and technical edit, but i do not have any warranty that the copyright holder's lawyers will not sue me for that after seeing my name in the history.
You are not infringing the copyright by your edit. The person who clicked save asserted that it was their own text, and released it under the GFDL - they are responsible! If you notice, you should tag it as a copyright violation, but it is not your duty to check.
I don't know. You are probably right, but the template has a big octagon STOP sign on it. Like, "it's a wiki, but don't dare editing it."
It also reiterates the need for wider inter-language coordination and cooperation, but that's a separate thread.