On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:55 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
The Swedish Wikipedia has drawn a line in the sand that all content in article space should meet the definition of "free content".[http://freedomdefined.org/]
I agree that they've been drawing a line in the sand, all right.
The reason for using this criteria is so that there is not a need to consult a different license for each logo in order to determine what uses are acceptable.
The issue, though, is that there's no specific problem at all associated with the appearances of the Wikimedia copyrighted and trademarked logos in the contexts in which they are used. *In other words, all this attention has been focused on a problem that has never occurred with regard to the images in question.*
I keep pointing out, of course, that there's lots of material in Swedish Wikipedia that's not freely licensed -- for example, the names of Living Persons or the true names of contributors who choose to share them.
What seems to me to be happening here is a kind of nervous insistence on a very simplistic kind of ideological consistency, which, if it were followed further along this extreme, would threaten to make Wikipedia unusable. Consider for example the famous quotation mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance .
The availability of a WMF license for their logos is useful for some
purposes, however the Wikimedia logos do not meet the criteria of free content.
And therefore if the Wikimedia logos are used with permission on Wikimedia-hosted projects, the earth will crack open, and dogs and cats will start living together openly.
If Wp.Sv doesn't want to accept non-free licenses in article space, then it is understandable that the WMF logos need to go as well.
This is perhaps too broad a use of the word "understandable" than I am used to.
--Mike