Delirium wrote:
Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
In this case I would tend to interpret the submission of the thesis to the appropriate university authorities as a form of prior publication.
Agreed. This is a nice "bright line" rule that won't get us into endless debates with physics cranks. We can still omit, for example, self-published books.
Hopefully it won't come up much, but it's actually very hard these days to determine what a "real" publisher is. There's a *lot* of even widely-distributed books that are put out by fairly small publishers and then distributed through a larger network, almost in the same way that self-published books are. To use this example, most university publishers are essentially vanity presses---apart from the big ones like MIT Press and Oxford University Press, the rest are simply imprints that, if they're published at all, are done on a pay-to-publish basis.
I'm counting upon this being an infrequent occurence. The bulk of things being put into Wikisource are Public Domain documents. With more recent things we often need more discussion on copyright issues. Of course the cranks are only too willing to license their material because they want all the exposure they can get, and in the context of such questions there is an opportunity to squeeze out the self-published. If a few get through because a university press has acted as a vanity publisher, I don't think it will ever be enough to worry much about.
Ec