I thought that it might be borderline, but, since the translator is
Helga J, I thought I'd ask around. We've dealt in the past with huge
amounts of website copying and pasting, most of which has been found and
fixed (I think). I this case, we are dealing with direct translations
of someone else's articles, which are under copyright. The translations
are then posted in their entirety. I'm also frankly not sure the
translations aren't merely google translations fixed slightly.
Any comments on how to proceed?
Jules
Lee Daniel Crocker wrote:
>I'd be happy to disable this feature for now (and another
>undocumented feature I won't mention :-), but my first inclination is
>to leave it in and simply not document or encourage it. That way,
>the only folks likely to use it are those who go out of their way to
>look for it because they really need it. And I /do/ think there are
>at least a few cases where its use is entirely appropriate.
Although I still think that this is a great idea,
I'm going to make a stronger (or more precise) statement than before
and say that it should *not* be implemented until we're certain how.
That is, until we've discussed the notation well enough
that we have a version that will at least be backwards compatible,
then we shouldn't allow any articles to be created with it.
We can start discussing this now, and if we decide by Saturday, fine.
Otherwise wait.
For an example of the sort of incompatibility that I mean,
recall my idea to render "[[##History]]" as "<a name="History">History</a>"
(with generalisations like "[[##History|Herstory]]",
to be rendered as "<a name="History">Herstory</a>").
It now renders as "<a name="History"></a>", which is very different.
People will code "[[##History]]History",
which is not backwards compatible if we adopt my suggestion later.
-- Toby Bartels
toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu
> Which ones do you think of? Maybe links to nearly static pages,
> like [[NPOV]]. But I think we don't have many articles of this
> kind, so maybe we can handle this like we do now, by pointing the
> reader explicitely to the heading.
I'm thinking things like the pages for countries, most of which will
be short, but many of which will be two or three screenfuls, and
almost all of which will have a "history" section. That section may
be only a paragraph or two, not enough to really merit its own
article, but it may still be further than a screenful down from the
start of the article, so if you want to reference information about
the history of Lithuania, [[Lithuania#history]] seems like the way to
do it. The other option is to split the history section into its own
article--some will do exactly that (China, for example, will probably
be subdivided even more). But I think the author ought to be able to
choose. Anyone editing the Lithuania article will see the anchor,
and leave it at an appropriate place--or else if he eliminates it, he
should take care to find and fix the pages that link to it ("What
links here" finds all links to the page, which will have to be
examined to see which link only to the fragment).
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I'd be happy to disable this feature for now (and another
undocumented feature I won't mention :-), but my first inclination is
to leave it in and simply not document or encourage it. That way,
the only folks likely to use it are those who go out of their way to
look for it because they really need it. And I /do/ think there are
at least a few cases where its use is entirely appropriate.
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> It would be a very unusual fact packed article that would be
> fair use under those circumstance. The cool creative aspect
> of the articles is what is covered by copyright and not subject
> to fair use. Like a phone book is covered by fair use...
You almost got that right: a phone book isn't copyrightable
in the first place (not being "creative expression"), so fair
use doesn't apply at all. "Fair use" is an exception whereby
one is allowed to use parts of a copyrighted work that would
otherwise be disallowed, as long as those uses meet certain
criteria (limited amounts, for educational use, comment or
criticism, etc...)
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Kurt Jansson wrote:
>I don't like the idea. Having an index above the article is a good
>idea, but linking into an article is not. I makes the Wikipedia more
>static. Headings will change, articles will be completely rewritten with
>a new structure, and people shouldn't worry about it ("Hmm, I'll better
>leave it like it is, or xx links will be broken").
This is a good point.
For my purposes, I'd be happy if the functionality were limited to
links within a single article, which removes this problem.
Of course, if an article is a reasonable length,
then this functionality is only a convenience, not a necessity.
I would agree that we should hold off on this pending further discussion.
-- Toby Bartels
toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu
Presumably Daniel Lee Crocker wrote:
>There is no longer a description field on the upload form--just
>a summary field for the upload, intended to describe the upload
>(which might be one of many revisions, for example), not the image
>itself. There is now a whole page dedicated to each image for that
>purpose, and there's a link to it on the page that reports a
>successful upload, but I suppose it would probably be a good idea
>to put some more text reminding uploaders to actually put
>something there.
Given that each revision may be from a different source,
I think that it's entirely appropriate to have a Source field
in the information for the individual upload.
And encouraging people to think of the source is probably never a bad idea.
-- Toby Bartels
toby+wikipedia-l(a)math.ucr.edu
> My question...are direct translations of entire articles,
> even when credited, fair use? I'm pretty sure that they
> are not -- I know they wouldn't pass muster at the university
> copy center...
Germany is a fellow signatory to the Berne convention, so they
have pretty close Copyright laws to ours, and we recognize their
copyrights. A translation is a "derivative work", and creation
of derivative works is one of the exclusive rights of the
copyright holder. Further, it is unlikely that our doing so
would fall under "fair use" if we used the whole derivative work
rather than just a small excerpt from it.
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> Just an idea for the photo upload page. This might not be
> practical, but since it's important to establish the source
> of each uploaded image couldn't a box be added to the upload
> form where the person uploading had to fill in the source of
> the image seperately instead of apending it to the description?
There is no longer a description field on the upload form--just
a summary field for the upload, intended to describe the upload
(which might be one of many revisions, for example), not the image
itself. There is now a whole page dedicated to each image for that
purpose, and there's a link to it on the page that reports a
successful upload, but I suppose it would probably be a good idea
to put some more text reminding uploaders to actually put
something there.
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