+100 to what Alessandro said.
Erik, to your point — yes, this should also include old books that are in the process of relicensing, if those books have been uploaded to us by or on behalf of a license holder, and we are confirming that and working through related steps.
There should be no 'collaborative and transformative work' done on this archive -- it would be for literal archiving of the materials and clarification / updating of their metadata, until they can be moved to a free + collaborative commons.
It helps our work to have a persistent public place (not randomly deleted from time to time!) to discuss determining their license status, getting formal and informal license clearance, discussions with the contributors to refine their understanding of options, debates among ourselves about whether a license grant was sufficient and how to obtain more clarity, &c.
S
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri., Aug. 7, 2020, 9:35 a.m. Alessandro Marchetti via Wikimedia-l, < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
We have an archive mixing different licenses now, one is Commons ranging from CC-0 to CC BY SA, and other ones are local Wikis sometimes including in their spectrum of situations many non-free files in fair use. this is proof that an archive hosting non-free files with other free-licensed information has nothing special per se. A new archive might simply be more clear and linear than those, since it would be designed specifically to handle the matter.
I work in outreach the whole time, you can give me all the money you want to improve my productivity, but I would still use it more efficiently if I could have a more integrated infrastructure specifically for this issue. A.
Il venerdì 7 agosto 2020, 08:52:31 CEST, Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.com> ha scritto:
On Sun, Aug 2, 2020 at 3:52 PM Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think we should mix NC with free-knowledge licenses . I do absolutely think we should maintain an archive, visible to the
public
with at most a simple hoop to jump through, of material that is offered
to
us in any legal way but not yet free.
Such an archive would _unavoidably_ "mix NC with free-knowledge licenses" -- because all collaborative and transformative work happening in the archive itself would be released under free knowledge licenses. Worse, any meaningful transformations of the archived works would result in derivative works that remain nonfree, directly enlisting volunteers in the creation of nonfree knowledge.
In any event, why create an archive for works under borderline terms, while ignoring more restricted works that could be plausibly released under a free license tomorrow? Works that are nonfree for simple economic reasons (e.g., some old but useful textbook) may often be easier to "set free" than those which are nonfree for reasons of longstanding policy (e.g, the WHO example). Why amass the latter and ignore the former? I don't see how this would strengthen Wikimedia's free knowledge commitment, but I can easily see how it could weaken it considerably and very quickly, whether or not that's the intent.
To be clear, I think creating free summaries and descriptions of nonfree works (from traditional textbooks and scientific papers to Khan Academy videos) is very much in line with the Wikimedia mission. I don't think it requires hosting the works. To the extent that there is concern about losing access to works that are currently available via public URLs, the use of Internet Archive enabled citation URLs provides a great example for how to avoid such link rot.
I'm sure there are also plenty of tech and non-tech ways Wikimedia could support volunteers and chapters that work on outreach to set more educational works free, none of which require the creation of a nonfree archive.
Warmly, Erik
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