On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 5:26 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:38 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Anthony wrote:
My complaint was that the WMF was (and still is) copying and distributing my copyrighted content in a manner other than that expressly provided under any license I have granted them.
Apart from the "expressly" provided (GFDL), there is the tradition of how Wikipedia and other wikis "have always worked", namely that we sometimes cut-and-paste text between articles without fully attributing the original author. This is how wikis work, and if you don't like it, you better not contribute your text.
I've stopped.
By the way, I stopped during a period where the rules at least stated that such cut-and-paste moves were unacceptable and would be fixed, and before I realized this was never intended to be followed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_fix_cut-and-paste_moves
A historical sidenote, for those following along at home (perhaps with popcorn?): The page Anthony linked to here refers to how to fix entire pages that are moved to new titles without using the "move" button. The move button was a technical development that allowed pages with their history to be moved intact; otherwise, people would just cut and past content to a new page, which didn't preserve the editing history. Fixing these moves is a somewhat complicated procedure that involves deleting the offending page then restoring it to merge the histories of the two articles. Cut and paste moves used to be much more common on en:, when people were still getting used to move procedures and subpages were allowed in the main space, but this merging technique is still sometimes necessary.
This procedure doesn't cover the more troublesome (from a copyright view) and much more common scenario of moving a paragraph of text from one article to a more appropriate one. E.g.: someone adds a biography of a basketball coach to an article about the team, not realizing that an article about the coach already exists. Someone moves the biographical paragraph to the appropriate article, thereby complying with a whole host of stylistic rules for the encyclopedia. Even if the mover complies with best practices and puts a full citation in their edit summary, only the most dedicated history analysis would be able to come up with the original author.
I do sometimes wonder how many of our pseudonymous and anonymous contributors are concerned with preserving their real-world copyrights in their work. "I want my spelling corrections to be attributed to Mr. Hottie25, no matter what happens to them."
-- phoebe