Hi all,
You might not quite realize it, but Magnus is on the verge of recommending
that Wikipedia switch to his very fine PHP wiki. Yes! This is good news,
but it ought to make you just slightly nervous. (Not to say we don't have
*great faith* in Magnus.) So help do some testing. Go to
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml
and do some bug-hunting. Does it work as you expected? Does it have all
the functionality of the old Wikipedia (that we want to keep)?
Not all features we've requested are implemented; but not all of them need
to be implemented yet. What's the phrase--rough consensus and running
code?
Just be gentle. :-)
Larry
You Wrote:
>I would not feel comfortable with the idea that Microsoft or Yahoo
>could take our content, make an encyclopedia out of it
>(redistributable, of course), and *not* include an invariant section
>amounting to a link back to us.
>
>Do others share this sentiment?
At least one does, emphatically.
KQ
0
A couple more things:
* I am not in favor of switching to another license for three reasons:
** designing a license is not easy, and it would suck a lot of
energy out of Wikipedia proper. Furthermore, it is not clear
that in the end we would be able to agree on one license.
** GFDL has goodwill in the community; our new license would be
scrutinized and certainly criticized by vocal GNU hawks.
** I think it is not too difficult for Wikipedia to comply with
GFDL, see below.
* the requirement that (at least) the five most important authors be
listed can be easily fulfilled once we keep complete logs (which is
desirable for other reasons as well). We simply list *all*
contributing authors then, and that is in compliance with GFDL.
* The requirement that titles have to be changed for every new version
of the work can be waived by the authors; we need to have a clear
statement on the submit page which says: "you are now submitting
your additions under GFDL without front- and back cover text and
invariant sections; furthermore you agree that modified versions of
the document may retain the same title. If you don't agree, don't
hit submit."
* Three additional arguments against the current strict table
attribution requirement occured to me last night:
** if we really want large websites to adopt Wikipedia (Microsoft
is out since they have Encarta, but Yahoo, Google and AOL are
potential customers), there is absolutely no way that we can hope to
dictate layout decisions to them. Their site designers will laugh us
out the door.
** On educational websites that use some materials from Wikipedia,
teachers typically would want to tell students about the project, but
they don't want their students to jump right in and contribute
to Wikipedia: it would distract too much; learning is the focus.
So you make actually discourage teachers from using Wikipedia
material, because the current table would suggest to students
that the teacher wants them to contribute.
** We are currently using FOLDOC materials which were licensed to
us under GFDL. Imagine their invariant section contained some
pink table and a blinking icon. I don't think we would
appreciate it.
Cheers,
Axel
I do.
-----Original Message-----
From: Jimmy Wales [mailto:jwales@bomis.com]
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 4:34 PM
To: wikipedia-l(a)nupedia.com
Subject: [Wikipedia-l] A question
I would not feel comfortable with the idea that Microsoft or Yahoo
could take our content, make an encyclopedia out of it
(redistributable, of course), and *not* include an invariant section
amounting to a link back to us.
Do others share this sentiment?
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[Wikipedia-l]
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http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
I'm not in disagreement with any of the sentiments expressed by Simon.
Two thoughts, though...
1. If we did decide to change the license, it would have to be to
something with equivalent or at least similar credibility to the
GNU license, which might be hard to achieve with something
homegrown. One of the most important "marketing" reasons for the
GNU license is that people can immediately see that it is a
"GNU-brand" license and therefore something that they can trust in
the usual ways.
2. It would probably be very difficult to change the license at this
point, since any change we made would have to be consistent with
the fact that the content in the encyclopedia is already GNU FDL,
and the "viral" nature of GNU licenses means that derivatives have
to have the same license.
I'm not even sure we could change from FDL to GPL.
It should be pointed out that the GPL isn't really appropriate,
either. It was designed for software and it is really incoherent when
you start reading it and thinking about things in a non-software
context. There is talk of compiled binaries, etc., which only apply
here by the very loosest of analogies.
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AxelBoldt raises a number of requirements under the
GNU Free Documentation License, such as the
requirement to preserve lists of five most significant
contributors (how could we ever judge that for
Wikipedia? we wouldn't even want to), change the title
of a new document, etc. Many of these things don't fit
too well with Wikipedia.
The FDL was not really designed for a purpose such as
Wikipedia. It was designed for programming manual
documentation. It was designed for an environment with
a small number of individual authors, dealing with a
relatively stable work, where different versions are
clearly distinguishable. The FDL was designed for an
environment were acknowledgement of individual
authorship and the identity of the work is essential,
but it was felt necessary to permit later authors to
modify the work in order to ensure it does not fall
out of date. Wikipedia, by contrast, has no clear
individual authorship, lacks a clear identity as a
work, and 'Modified Versions' are being created
constantly. Its a different paradigm, a different
method of production, and a license designed for one
paradigm doesn't fit a significantly different one
that well.
In some ways I think that the GNU GPL would be a much
better license for Wikipedia. Many of the additional
requirements that the FDL has over the GPL aren't
really relevant to Wikipedia. The GPL doesn't permit
requiring even collective acknowledgement, but as I
have argued I don't think the machinery of the FDL
license can handle the kind of acknowledgement
requirement we probably want.
The FDL allows the author to require the inclusion of
specific invariant sections. But when we want to
require acknowledgement, what is important is the
substance of the acknowledgement and its prominence,
not its exact reproduction (though as I have said,
exactly how exact a reproduction is required is
unclear.)
(On a sidepoint: Jimbo says he can't see how putting
the invariant section on a different page could comply
with the FDL. The FSF, which produced the FDL, creates
its manuals using texinfo. Texinfo documents, when
converted into HTML format, generally have a separate
page for each section or subsection. So, if we can
take the authors of the license as a guide, the
invariant section can be on a separate page, so long
as it is part of the same document, say by being
linked from a Table of Contents.)
Which is why I would creating a separate license for
Wikipedia, based on the FDL but with modifications to
fit Wikipedia's special conditions. Among other
things, I would delete the requirement for invariant
sections, and the stuff to do with "Endorsements",
"Acknowledgements", "Dedications", lists of authors,
renaming modified versions, etc. But I would add a
specific requirement to provide acknowledgement, with
some broad guidelines.
To get this new license we could simply modify the GNU
FDL. While the license for the license doesn't permit
modifications, I'm sure RMS would give us permission
if we explained why we wanted to do this, and called
it something else.
Two other issues remain. One is compatibility with FDL
documents being used in Wikipedia. Since the terms of
the license I am proposing are incompatible with the
FDL, since they don't require things that the FDL
does, and do require things that the FDL doesn't. Of
course, if the author gave permission this wouldn't be
a problem. But still, that would be different from the
current (informal) policy, which seems to permit any
FDL or other "Open Content" material to be added.
But I am unsure how much such material has been added,
and I question the legal adivisability of permitting
such material to be added, even if we continued to
distribute under the FDL. The FDL provides several
specific requirements for reproduction, which I doubt
anyone who has added such content has paid specific
attention to; and even if they did, as I have pointed
out many of these requirements (e.g. invariant
sections -- how possibly could anything in a Wikipedia
article be invariant?) don't really fit with
Wikipedia. And other "Open Content" licenses add their
own requirements as well. Since licenses can be quite
complex and can often impose conflicting terms, I
don't think it is advisable to let people add
copyrighted material of any sort, without specific
permission from the copyright holder.
The other issue is that people who have already
submitted their content have done so on the
understanding that it will be redistributed under the
FDL, and might not agree to having it redistributed
under another license. This raises quite a legal
conundrum. The only thing I can suggest is, that if
sufficent consensus arises in the Wikipedia community
on a license change, we widely publicise the license
change, allow anyone who does not want their material
to be distributed under that license object, and
consider those who do not object as consenting to
having their material distributed under the new
license.
I think that, rather than just creating a notice below
the submit button, we should provide a proper terms
and conditions notice, which should include that the
author consents to redistribution under the terms of
the license, or any later modifications of the license
or replacement license which may be agreed upon by the
Wikipedia community. Of course if we had a "any later
modifications or replacement license" clause, we'd
need to find some way for the will of the Wikipedia
community to be expressed (how about a Wikipedia
council? Wikipedia referenda? Wikipedia elections?).
And of course, any such new Wikipedia license or
Wikipedia terms and conditions of use should be
discussed and achieve wide consensus in the Wikipedia
community, before being put into practice. (I suppose
that Jimbo, since he owns the Wikipedia website, could
just produce his own terms and conditions of use
without consultation and impose us on it all. But I
trust he won't.)
Anyway, that is my latest thinking on the Wikipedia
licensing issue. I'm also going to add this on
Wikipedia commentary under Wikipedia, so people who
don't subscribe to Wikipedia-L can read/comment on it.
Simon J Kissane
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A couple of comments regarding the recent GFDL debate:
0) The rendering of the GFDL at
http://www.wikipedia.com/license/index.html sucks rocks. Several
@acronym's are still there, and the numbering is incorrect
(Preamble should be 0, the MODIFICATIONS section, when refering to
sections 2 and 3, means in fact sections 3 and 4.) It would be best
to simply link to the FSF's version at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft.fdl.html. In the sequel, I will use the
correct section numbers from FSF.
1) It is interesting to learn that every Wikipedia article is
considered to be a separate GFDL'd work. This should be stated
somewhere. It has real consequences.
2) Among them: the title of every article has to be changed if the
article is changed (5.1). To get around this, we would need some
note on the submit page, stating that the submitter permits
to retain the article's title even if the text is changed.
3) To use the GFDL, the license text has to be part of the document. A
link at the top (after the title) would probably be sufficient.
This is missing right now. Furthermore, this notice has to state
the invariant section title (for the link back that you want to
require) and cover texts (which I assume we don't care about).
4) The five most significant authors (at least) have to be maintained
in perpetuity (5.2)
5) I have no legal opinion about whether it is permissable to require
exact layout, down to the colors, of an invariant section. But I
would like it a lot better if we could relax and tone down our invariant
section requirement a bit, maybe like this:
"At prominent position, mention that this material originated at
Wikipedia.com, the free collaborative encyclopedia, and provide a
link back to Wikipedia's original article. Here is a suggested
HTML table to do so:..."
Imagine I want to put together a website for a class I'm teaching,
and use materials from Wikipedia. This fat table on every page?
Please.
Axel
Simon's questions were specifically about how it is that the license
permits us to require the inclusion of an HTML linkback in the
invariant sections. In my first response, I answered that question,
though of course more details may come out in the course of further
discussion.
However, here I want to explain why the attribution requirement is
important and a good thing.
One of my goals for the encyclopedia projects that I have started is
that they be *widely used*. Another goal is that my ideas of
openness, fairness, objectivity, community consensus become the
standard by which encyclopedias are judged.
What we want to see is Yahoo, AOL/Time Warner, Disney, Google,
Microsoft, Altavista, Lycos, etc., all decide to adopt our
encyclopedia as the foundation for their own-branded encyclopedia
products. But when they do so, we want them to link back to the
original project, so that we can ensure that we remain the "canonical
source" for our own community works.
I pick Microsoft for my example, because they are unpopular.
Imagine this scenario -- Microsoft takes our content, and makes their
own Microsoft Online Encyclopedia from it. Their version is on their
web pages and is modified by them. It is redistributable and
modifiable by others, as it has to be under the license. But (!)
imagine that we do not require them to link back to us. And (!)
imagine that their version is not editable by anyone but them.
Then we end up with a situation in which their propaganda can be
inserted into the Wikipedia, and their readers have no means to find
us, the original source and the ultimate corrective to bias. I think
that's undesirable.
I don't mind Microsoft taking our content, republishing it with their
own propaganda inserted. That's fine, that's something we accept
under the FDL. But I want them to include the invariant section --
the invariant section which leads people back to the original, so they
can compare for themselves, and hopefully join our community.
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I only recently discovered the requirement to place a
table at the bottom of every page that uses content
taken from Wikipedia (see
http://www.wikipedia.com/license/fdl.html).
I don't like that idea, and having read the GNU FDL,
have come to the conclusion that the requirement is
most likely in violation of the terms of the license.
The FDL permits the inclusion of invariant sections,
but it makes clear that these are front cover sections
or appendices, i.e. separate sections at the beginning
or end of a work, not something to be included on
every page. It also implies that each of these
sections is to have a unique title -- are we to give
each link table a unique name? It also implies clearly
that the invariant sections are in the original copy
of the document -- which the table links aren't in the
original copy (www.wikipedia.com).
Furthermore, even if these link tables were present in
the original copy, and mentioned, and given section
names, nowhere does Wikipedia contain a notice
indicating them as invariant sections, along the lines
contained in the FDL.
Finally, requiring them to be in HTML seems to be
violative of the FDL as well. What if I wanted to do
my website in some other markup language, such as
XHTML or SGML or XML or WML or (insert some not yet
invented language here) instead? Then I can't
technically include the exact HTML, which seems to
amount to a requirement that any redistribution on a
website be in HTML. Additional restrictions over and
above those in the FDL are prohibited by the FDL.
Now of course, any of these terms could be added if
some one individual owned the content to Wikipedia,
but they don't. The contributors license it everyone
else under the terms of the FDL; attempting to
redistribute it under any additional restriction
contrary to the FDL is in violation of their
copyright, unless you get their consent, which would
mean the consent of every single contributor to
Wikipedia.
I understand that all people want to do is require
acknowledgement, all I am saying is that legal means
must be chosen to carry this out. The legal means are
those permitted by the FDL, which is by placing a
statement (and a URL) as front-cover matter,
back-cover matter, or in an invariant section.
Websites copying Wikipedia are required to include
these sections, but these are separate sections, not
notices on every single page.
Simon James Kissane
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I have looked into this a little bit more -- I just realized that the
existing software does give us some tools to combat this kind of
vandalism.
First, I have fixed it so that only editors can edit the HomePage. I think
this is less desirable than our ideal system in which all the regulars
magically and transparently have this power.
If you want to edit the homepage, email me for the administrator
password -- I will give it out more or less willy-nilly to anyone who
I know. If the vandal starts using the password, then we'll know it
is an "inside job" and we'll have to think harder.
Second, I have added some ip numbers to the banned list. I'm prepared
to add more. This is less than 100% ideal, obviously, since innocent
people might be at the same ip numbers.
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