2009/11/22 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Keep in mind that this is not about non-free content, this is not about a possibility that professor didn't understand all consequences of his approval; this is just about The Form. The Bureaucracy. Note, also, that this cooperation exists for four years. I don't think that it is reasonable.
Oh, certainly. The sort of case you describe is just silly.
A lot of the problem is that Wikipedia attracts geeks, who tend to trying to render things black-and-white wherever possible. So they get heavily bureaucratic with very little impetus.
The problem here with clearing away the bureaucracy is that the impetus for it makes repeated checking sometimes necessary.
(e.g. I'm appalled that the Flickr copyright checker is just a bot to go to Flickr and look at what the CC licence there is, rather than a human sanity-checking whether it's plausible the Flickr poster really does have the right to release the image. I don't mean a complicated process, I mean even checking that it's plausible.)
I don't know of an easy solution that doesn't involve spreading the notion of free content further. Using ourselves as the existence proof helps in my experience - i.e., "of course you can give everything away and do well. We do, and you're talking to me because we do."
- d.