On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Michael Peel
<email@mikepeel.net> wrote:
Andrew,
Something's been bugging me with the School's Wikipedia for a while
now: why have all of the references been removed? From my point of
view (currently-working-on-being-an-academic), references are
fundamental; without them the School's Wikipedia needs a huge
[citation needed].
To be more specific, my concern revolves around students thinking
that writing things without referencing them is OK, which is a big
problem at university level, as well as on Wikipedia itself. It also
makes it a lot harder to spot which parts of the School's Wikipedia
that may not be entirely correct.
BTW: I think you and everyone else involved with the School's
Wikipedia have done a great job; I'm just curious as to why you made
this decision.
Mike
On 24 Oct 2008, at 16:23, Andrew Cates wrote:
> 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@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?
>>
>>
>
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