On 08/16/11 1:20 AM, David Gerard wrote:
On 16 August 2011 09:18, David
Gerard<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote
(BTW - we *do* have someone making sure the
Internet Archive - or a
similar organisation, if there are any similar organisations - has a
full collection of all our backups, so if Florida was hit by a meteor
tomorrow people would have something to start from?)
argh. That's a question,
not a statement. Do we have some third party
with copies of everything? I suggest the IA as they have the disk
space and, as a library, rabidly archive everything they can get their
hands on.
One suggestion for archiving would be to have a complete set of projects
filed with the copyright office and other key depositories quarterly.
This could also address a potential long-term copyright problem. This
has less to do with Wikipedia infringing on the copyrights of others
than with the reverse. It already happens that others use Wikipedia
material without credit in works on which they claim copyright. Re-use
of that material on-wiki at a later date will inevitably result in a
copyvio squabble, especially if the originally plundered version is no
longer recognizable. This could be many years hence. What other means
are available to protect the viral nature of freely licensed material?
Forks could also be helpful in this regard. They would need to respect
free licences, and, as a by-product, add evidence favouring the freeness
of the material. A person creating a fork based on some topic area is
unlikely to significantly alter all the articles imported, preferring to
draw different conclusions from the same underlying facts. This is
bound to leave an identifiable residue that will protect the licence.
Ray