Hello Leila,
Just two quick notes on what you've said: *" We should get comfortable thinking about these trade-offs as we think about how to bring more diverse people and content to the project" - I face this argument constantly in my life as an active Wikimedian. University teachers tell we can have all papers from their university on Commons, Wikisource, if we allow NC-ND. VIPs tell me they will give a number of exclusive materials, given that they are blocked from commercial use. Professional photographers, same story. To all of them I explain this is a question of a basic principle of the project, the principle of Free Knowledge, and that this is the essence, this is at the core of Wikimedia projects, and can't be negotiated. This is how I've been understanding our communities general thinking and ideals for the many years I've been around, so changing that to accommodate more diversity really seems something absolutely alien to our mission as Wikimedians, independently of the merits of the content that could be incorporated in the projects that way. *In order to protect local folklore from "undue exploitation", Mozambique government has decided that all manifestations of folklore in the country are protected by copyright, and that they own that copyright. Result: we end up with an huge cultural gap in Mozambique at the Wikimedia projects. Not only in Mozambique, but in a number of other countries that apply similar legal restrictions to this kind of cultural materials.
The solution for both cases has been, for well more than a decade, to include that content as necessary under special provisions in some of our projects - SEE EDP at https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy - depending on approval of the project local community. So the solution for that problem already exists for long, and this is not only reinventing the wheel, but doing so at the expense of our most dear core principles and mission.
Best, Paulo
Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org escreveu no dia quinta, 15/08/2019 à(s) 05:42:
Hi Paulo,
On Wed, Aug 14, 2019 at 6:38 PM Paulo Santos Perneta paulosperneta@gmail.com wrote:
If they don't have legal resources, then it is pointless to use NC ND for the content, as they will not be suing anyone that ignores the license
and
commercializes it anyway.
In practice, this can happen. Two points to keep in mind:
- Building trust and relationships with new communities may require
taking steps that we may not have been taking so far. People operate in different contexts and they have varying experiences, and we may sometimes have to change the way we do things to include them and their knowledge. We should get comfortable thinking about these trade-offs as we think about how to bring more diverse people and content to the project. (I'm not arguing that we should do what this proposal says at this point. We should discuss it though in the talk page.)
- Having some legal pathway can be attractive to some folks, /even if/
they don't exercise it. This is an assurance that they can have some control over their culture and the narratives around it and I can see how this can be important for some marginalized communities. This middle step may be needed. Also, if the legal pathway is there, they can always some day decide to pursue it.
If such knowledge can't be freely shared, then it has no place in
Commons,
in my opinion. If that makes it less visible, then that is the problem of the communities that don't share it freely. One cannot have both things
at
the same time.
Two points again: ;)
- Re Commons or not is something we should discuss in the talk pages.
Peter had some really good points early on on this thread about the 3 different options available.
- This won't be only their problem. It will be our shared problem. If
Commons ends up not being the solution, we shouldn't stop there. We should think through what else we can do to make bringing of their knowledge to Wikimedia projects happen. While I don't know what the answers are, I know that we should try more. From a narrow research perspective: this is immensely important for addressing Wikimedia's knowledge gaps for the sake of our own immediate users but also for the sake of indirect users of Wikimedia content. Wikimedia is imo one of the cornerstones of the Web. The content we collectively bring to Wikimedia projects is no longer /just/ used directly on Wikipedia (even that alone is enough argument to attempt to find solutions for the kind of gaps we're talking about). It's being used by a variety of technologies to build algorithms and machines that have impact on people's lives. Gaps in Wikimedia can become a source of bias and gaps on search engines, home devices, school material, ... .
I'll keep the specific comments about the proposals for the talk pages.
Best, Leila
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