A year or so ago I realized that it is better to make an auxiliary site to Wikipedia [in Serbian] than to spend a lot of time in explaining to students that everyone has to send to me the sentence "I agree that all of my work is realized under ...". It may be funny for the first couple of times, it may be assumed as the part of the job during the next couple of times, but spending ~1 hour per week in explaining what someone should write inside of an email for contribution of three articles -- is too much.
But, it was a kind of problems which couldn't be avoided. Our present system of getting permissions is not able to handle 100 persons at one time. And we should think how to solve it.
But, during the couple of previous days I've got one more contribution to our Monument. This kind of contributions make me to think that Wikipedia in English (not just en.wp for sure) is becoming -- slowly but surely -- the main problem in spreading free knowledge. So, here is the development:
* In 2005 I've asked one professor for permissions for his material. In those times OTRS didn't exist, so I've left it on Wikipedia [1].
* Four years later one pedantic administrator of en.wp noticed that that professor gave permissions under GFDL, not under CC-BY-SA. Even a moron would be able to understand that GFDL was just a word -- which doesn't mean anything to that professor -- inside of the clear explanation of the copyleft principle.
* So, I've asked the professor again. I've explained that I need his approval for using material under CC-BY-SA and he agreed. Of course, I've just repeated the same, copyleft conditions and gave the link to the CC-BY-SA human readable code. And I forwarded it to permissions-en.
* Then I've got one more pedantically bureaucratic answer: Professor didn't repeat The Great Sentence of Our Holy Secrets (he just said "Dear Milos, You have my permission for usage of materials from my websites, also including...") and he said that he is giving permissions "to the extent that he is authorized to give us such permission for usage", which is not, from the bureaucratic point of view (BPOV), clear enough. It is suggested: "Any material that he is not authorized to give us permission to use must be clearly noted." Even, again, a moron would be able to understand what has been created by professor at his site and what is not. For example, if he used some photo and he is describing that photo as an art and mentions the author of the photo -- logically, this photo is not his. If he quoted some author and describes that quote -- logically, this quote is not his. And so on. The other problem which such bureaucracy is opening is the fact that that suggestion means without any doubt that I would need a week or more of work to mark everything on professor's five sites.
* So, my only response to such moronic bureaucracy is: Fuck you! Of course, it is not about particular Wikimedia volunteers, it is about the whole system which transforms good persons into bureaucratic morons.
And why it is so? Because we have hundreds or thousands of cases before courts because not so pedantically defined sentences? Because it is reasonable to suppose that a professor who already gave to us permissions to get materials from his site four years ago will sue us because not so well worded agreement for giving materials under CC-BY-SA? Fuck you, again!
I mentioned just two examples, but there are at least a couple of more similar from my experience.
As this kind of bureaucracy is so deeply inside of Wikimedia and especially at Wikipedia and especially at Wikipedia in English -- the only solution which I am able to see is to create a number of auxiliary sites which would take care about permissions instead of Wikimedia. However, this is a very clear path of making Wikipedia and Wikimedia less relevant. After five years of such tendencies some standards will be created. After another five Wikipedia won't be necessary anymore.
I would like to say that the option is to work against such bureaucracy. However, I am not so optimistic in relation to the large projects which are already deeply bureaucratic. Even a number of smaller projects suffer from bureaucracy because of strong influence of the large projects.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Millosh/Permissions_from_Robert_Elsie