On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:55 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)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