--- On Fri, 9/19/08, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
From: Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] deviation from the GFDL in smaller projects To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, September 19, 2008, 5:38 AM On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 1:22 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
One worrying thing that i noticed is that in some
of these projects
there is no strict adherence to GFDL-only text.
Since my first day in
Wikipedia i understood how important the GFDL is.
I understood that
articles cannot be copied verbatim even from
sources whose copyright
terms allow copying for non-commercial usage,
because the "free" in
"The Free Encyclopedia" does not refer
only to price.
Well, there is even more of that than you describe.
There are projects that are either unable or unvilling
to enforce proper
licencing of images. (Read: many/most images are
without any copyright
templates.)
I intentionally limited my description of the problem to text. Image fair use is a separate issue.
There are projects that, despite dedicating
significant attention to
copyright issues, have significant amount of material
copied from print
sources, and thus practically undetectable.
Yes, this exists. I am referring to cases where the projects (not just single contributors) are aware that the license of the text is not GFDL.
This may come as a surprise to Westerners, but most
people out there are
not really aware of copyright. Intelligent, educated
adults may have no
knowledge or understanding of it, and rise a protest
when you tell them
they can't copy text from somewhere.
True: I intentionally wrote "aware that the license of the text is not GFDL" above, because it is possible that they think that "free as in beer" is GFDL-compatible.
I would volunteer to approach such projects with an explanation of the importance of the GFDL, but i am not a lawyer and not an official representative of WMF. The WMF can tell me to "be bold", but since i am not talking about cases of singular articles, but whole projects which apparently have a policy of disregard to GFDL compatibility, i am quite unsure. The legitimacy of a project may be in question, so i am reluctant to handle it all by myself.
Depending on the language, you may the person best able to educate some of these wikis. Or especially if you don't want publicize who they are ;) The legitimacy of the project should not brought up until some education effrt has proven to fail. Do you know about the WMF licensing resolution [1]? Is it translated into the languages in question? If not, the first step would be working on such a translation and then bringing that to the attention of the community that is deviating. Next figure out the likliest Wikipedia full of knowledge people on copyright to be able to communicate with this smaller wiki (look at the most common second languages on the small wiki). Then recruit some people from the bigger wiki to help you answer questions and explain things.
Birgitte SB
[1]http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy