Bryan,
Lets just stop there and think about is shall we?
When we started this project in 2006 we were rated as "easily highly
compliant" by mirrors and forks group (and we do have a local copy of
the license, which is still above "medium"). Would you like all the
diffs on WP? That first version was online up on fixedreference.org/ /
Subsequent to that we were asked to add image pages and did, partly
because Anthere is a sweetie and partly because we could see the
argument logically. Creative Commons was explicit about local copies
of names, it was unclear whether people you upload a file hitting a
"GDFL" submit button can impose additional conditions like CC but fair
enough. It is only 34500 additional pages to check for vandalism,
swear words and clean up and include as disk space versus 5500 pages
for the actual content.
So we are an "improved on an easily highly compliant position" basis
original standard. The license hasn't changed since then.
So what has happened? People have just added their own ideas of what
they'd like to the "interpretation", without reference to the license,
including loads of stuff the license doesn't say. Can they do that
legally? Of course not. And should we respect as a community standard
all the additional "nice-to-haves" added on? Well, we are nice guys
and we're trying to and we'd like to but I kind of think a little more
apology for moving all the goalposts around and putting barriers to
accessibility in would be in order. Insistence on the image pages is a
series pain in the back-side to offline copies already.
We are comfortable we comply legally and the vast number of comments
we have had over the years have been supportive of our interpretation
of the licenses, and desirous to improve access to Wikipedia. This may
be different to the intepretation of some people who lately edit the
copyright pages but they haven't even produced a rationale for how the
content relates to the licenses.
Currently we are more compliant at least in respect of image pages
than the other offline "official" community projects (the Wikipedia
Release Version series). And as far as we can see we comply completely
with the actual text of the license. If you want more than that I am
happy talking about what we can do but only on a basis which is
reflective of the situation.
Andrew
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote:
> Andrew Cates wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> I have left a fairly full reply to this on the WMF blog awaiting
>> approval from Jay and also it is discussed on the project pages on
>> Wikipedia, over several years. There is a gap between the wording of
>> licenses and urban myths circulating about what they say.
>
> I realize that the GFDL is a sucky licence and is poorly defined
> legally, but regardless of one's various personal interpretations of it
> schools-wikipedia still fails to be compliant by the standards that
> Wikipedia's community has settled on (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_Compliance -
> schools-wikipedia fits the "medium compliance" definition to a T). Since
> this project has received a WikiMedia seal of approval IMO it really
> should meet our own standards when it comes to GFDL compliance. What
> will all those other medium-compliance mirrors think if we let this
> particular one slide?
>
>
Message I sent to ChapCom for your information:
----- Forwarded Message ----
> From: Andrew Turvey <raturvey(a)yahoo.co.uk>
> To: chaptercommittee-l(a)wikimedia.org
> Cc: WMUK <board(a)wikimedia.org.uk>
> Sent: Tuesday, 28 October, 2008 23:50:16
> Subject: Re: Wikimedia UK v2 (proposed) - Constitution
>
> Dear Chapters Committee,
>
> Further to my email of 16th, Andrew Whitworth came to our meeting on 21st and
> fed back two queries regarding our proposed Memorandum and Articles of
> Association (M&A) regarding the role of the General Meeting and the appointment
> of auditors.
>
> I have added some explanatory notes at
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/AoA#General_meetings and
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/AoA#Notice_of_General_Meet…
> which I hope will be enough to explain the situation.
>
> Since then we met again on Monday when we formed the company using our draft M&A
> and this will be sent to Companies House for registration later this week once
> the documents have been officially sworn.
>
> Please let me know if you have any further queries or if there is anything else
> we can do to encourage a positive recommendation to the Foundation. If you
> decide you do want any changes to be made to the Memorandum and Articles we will
> still be able to do this after the formation has completed by passing an
> amendment.
>
> Look forward to hearing from you soon,
>
>
> Andrew Turvey
> Secretary
> Wikimedia UK (proposed)
>
> Information contained in this email may be confidential. If you are not the
> intended recipient please notify the sender immediately and delete this email
> from your system. Unauthorised copying, forwarding or other use of any
> confidential information in this email may result in legal action.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> > From: Andrew Turvey
> > To: chaptercommittee-l(a)wikimedia.org
> > Cc: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org; WMUK
> > Sent: Thursday, 16 October, 2008 2:00:57
> > Subject: Wikimedia UK v2 (proposed) - Constitution
> >
> > Dear Chapters Committee,
> >
> > I am writing on behalf of the UK Wikimedian community which is currently
> working
> > to establish a new chapter for the United Kingdom.
> >
> > Over the past two months, we have been working through the steps to establish
> > this new chapter. Starting in late August, we publicised our initiative
> > throughout the UK wikimedian community and invited other wikimedians to get
> > involved. We held an election of an interim Board in September, and their
> first
> > task was to draw up a constitution.
> >
> > After extensive consultation with the community and discussion among the Board
>
> > members, we approved our draft constitution on Monday and would like to submit
>
> > it to you now for your comments and approval in accordance with the "Step by
> > step chapter creation guide".
> >
> > We have decided that the most appropriate legal structure for our chapter
> would
> > be a "Company Limited by Guarantee". We have based our constitution (termed
> the
> > "Memorandum of Association" and the "Articles of Association") on the Model
> > documents issued by the UK Charity Commission. The main revisions we have made
>
> > to these is to shift the general balance of powers between the Directors and
> the
> > members towards the members and to allow for electronic communications and
> > meetings.
> >
> > Our draft constitution can be found here:
> >
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/MoA&oldid=122…
> > and
> >
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/AoA&oldid=122…
> >
> >
> > The text of the constitution is shown in Bold text with additional explanatory
>
> > notes in Italic. Note that the Italic notes do not form part of the
> > constitution. Revisions to the Model documents are highlighted by underlining
> > additional text and striking through the deleted text.
> >
> > Please let us know if you have any queries regarding these and otherwise we
> look
> > forward to hearing from you once you have had a chance to consider these.
> >
> > Yours faithfully,
> >
> >
> > Andrew Turvey
> > Secretary
> > Wikimedia UK v2 (proposed)
> >
> > Information contained in this email may be confidential. If you are not the
> > intended recipient please notify the sender immediately and delete this email
> > from your system. Unauthorised copying, forwarding or other use of any
> > confidential information in this email may result in legal action.
Sent off-list by accident:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>
Date: 2008/10/24
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9
BitTorrent link up
To: Andrew Cates <Andrew(a)soschildren.org>
2008/10/24 Andrew Cates <Andrew(a)soschildren.org>:
> Hi Guys,
>
> I have left a fairly full reply to this on the WMF blog awaiting
> approval from Jay and also it is discussed on the project pages on
> Wikipedia, over several years. There is a gap between the wording of
> licenses and urban myths circulating about what they say.
>
> Broadly the GFDL demands that authors are "credited" but does not
> include anything on how you idenitify them (unlike the creative
> commons licenses). Either this means to comply with GFDL you need to
> carry a local copy of the edit history (which provides the only local
> way of identifying authors, albeit in a tedious fashion) including all
>>10,000 versions of the Global Warming article complete with every
> piece of obscene vandalism etc.) or this means you have to credit
> authors providing a theoretically possible route to identify them.
> Nothing in between this is any better than the second option since to
> find an author for a piece of text you still have to go to the page
> history on Wikipedia. The German DVD which carries an author list copy
> locally which may be better for egos but is not more compliant than
> us: to get the author who wrote xyz is still a long trip through WP
> page histories. There is no different in license terms between a link
> back and any other way given of directing the reader to the page
> histories in Wikipedia. GFDL does not mention "link" (see
> Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License)
>
> Some of the CC licenses include carrying a local copy of an artists
> preferred name (we do this as we carry the image pages).
Sure, it's been discussed constantly for the last 7 years and there
has been no conclusion, so I would strongly advise erring on the side
of caution. I see no reason to include each revision, the GFDL only
talks about listing authors, not listing who wrote each bit. That
means you just need the history page, not all the pages it links to.
An obscure and non-explicit reference to a page that may well not be
accessible to the reader, hidden away on a page I doubt more than 1%
of users will read (or even be able to find if they wanted to know who
wrote an article) is hardly in the spirit of the license, is it? All
you need to do is include a list of names (and/or pseudonyms) with
each article, that isn't hard.
If you want to encourage the use of free content, you need to do it
properly. That you can convince yourself that you're just about
complying with the license if you stand on your head and squint as you
look at it is not enough.
2008/10/24 Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com>:
> At 09:29 +0800 24/10/08, Ian A. Holton wrote:
>>What for? Wikinews?
>>
>>2008/10/24 David Gerard <<mailto:dgerard@gmail.com>dgerard(a)gmail.com>
>>
>>We need a good free content pic of this:
>><http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7687600.stm>http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/7687600.stm
>>
>>- d.
>>
>
> I think the joke is on the journalists. There is clearly a road
> repair, and a car does not have round edges...
That's what I thought. It seems an unlikely coincidence that the car
happened to be parked exactly on the repair. One possibility is that
the person they sent out to photograph it photographed the wrong
thing. The other possibility is that the entire story is bogus.
I sent my mum, a primary school teacher, a link to the new schools
wikipedia and she suggested we add it to the Teacher Resource Exchange
(TRE). It would be moderated by one of their contracted teachers, we
would get feedback, and lots of teachers would find out about it. Has
anyone looked into doing this already or should I find out more?
2008/10/23 Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com>:
> At 14:12 +0100 22/10/08, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> > 50% of what?
>>
>>People eligible to vote, that is people that signed up as being
>>interested in being guarantor or supporting members.
>>
>>___________________________________
>
> Ah yes, but not the potential Wikimedia UK membership.
True, but that's not to do with voter turnout, that's to do with how
well we got the word out about the new chapter. Given that we were
trying to do things as quickly as possible, I think we did quite well.
Jay,
As agreed we have put the text of the agreed joint Press Release here:
http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/2008-wikipedia-for-scho…
Our site is accredited with Google News as a news source so this will
go life fairly quickly.
We are sending it out to our (mainly UK) media contacts today (this is
manual and will get done over a few hours). Can I leave it to you to
put this up on the Wikimedia Foundation site and to mail your media
contacts?
David,
Last time you were helpful in getting some discussion on slashdot/ the
registry etc. Any help would be appreciated.
Wikimedia-UK list: Any help in getting UK media sources interested
would be appreciated
Andrew