[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l>
to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>Eclecticology wrote:
>>How others use the material is their problem, and their risk. We
>>shouldn't have to baby-sit them. Whatever license or copyrights are
>>applied to Wikipedia reflects a collective comfort level. The user is
>>still responsible for his own due-dilligence, no matter how conservative
>>we are on the matter.
>They're not "others", lot of "them" are Wikipedians.
>If everyone had to consult a lawyer before distributing free software,
>it wouldn't be half as successful as it is now.
This isn't entirely true; the more paranoid must still check the less paranoid.
But Wikipedia needs to make it easy by separating out the "fair use" pics
and not claiming any longer that they are being distributed under the GFDL.
As for brief quotations, well, I knew that the GNU licences
would come back to bite us someday, but I expected 50 years from now
(hopefully *after* current copyright law became impossible to maintain).
I never thought they would prove to be inadequate so soon!
Surely RMS thought of brief quotations, one hopes?
-- Toby
What, if anything, can be done in Wikipedia with texts and pictures that
fall under the Open Content License (either in original form or one of its
restrictions)?
Andre Engels
Markb has been posting a bunch of very minimal entries on things like
[[cleft palate]] (which I destubbed slightly), along with [[Kingstone]], which
I just blanked because it was all insults, and [[Dilgreen]], which I'm about
to blank as both insulting and self-contradictory.
I'm not sure if this is just newbie stuff, or worse; anyone want to help me
keep an eye on him?
I created his talk page to leave a note about [[stellated earflaps]] before I
took a look at his other recent creations.
--
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr(a)redbird.org
http://www.redbird.org
Today, June 2, 2003, the Swedish wiki website susning.nu reached
25,000 articles (old comma count, or 37,000 pages in all), thereby
passing c2.com in size (their articles are longer, and I think they
expunge bad articles, but they are at 24,300 pages in all), and
becoming the world's 2nd biggest wiki, surpassed only by the English
Wikipedia.
The Swedish language is spoken by 9 million people -- the population
size of Michigan. Four times more people speak Polish and ten times
more speak German, so we should expect the Wikipedias in these
languages to grow past us sooner or later, not to mention other
languages.
In May 2003, susning.nu had 1.9 million page views from 249 thousand
unique IP addresses. In this month, 222 different users contributed
to the articles. (All anonmyous contributions are counted as one
user, named "anonymous".)
Since susning.nu was started in October 2001, the "save" button has
been pressed 144,281 times by 1099 different users. The following
contributors have been the most active:
anonymous 36560 (25%)
Lars Aronsson 27182 (19%)
Dan Koehl 5551 (4%)
DavidPettersson 4880 (3%)
Limed 3332 (2%)
Dewil 3269 (2%)
Pel 3241 (2%)
Liftarn 3196 (2%)
Josephzohn 3113 (2%)
Nixdorf 2552 (2%)
Andreas Ribbefjord 2387 (2%)
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/
[Note: This is posted to both <wikitech-l> and <wikipedia-l>
to preserve continuity; replies should go to <wikipedia-l>.]
Eclecticology wrote in part:
>I don't see where we have had problems
>with the copyright holders themselves. It would be easy to agree to
>remove this material if the request came from the copyright holder
>himself. The pressure so far seems to be coming from people who imagine
>that something is copyright.
>My inclination would be to use borderline material, with an appropriate
>warning that we will happily remove on request from a properly
>identified owner.
This is a big difference between images and text.
Our text is not only distributed -- it's modified in many ways.
A copyright problem there can infect many articles later on.
With images, we don't have nearly this sort of practical problem.
But we still need to clearly separate out the non-free images
to aid later distributors, try not to rely on them for content,
and replace them with free images when possible.
-- Toby
Hello,
I was wondering if anyone wanted to give their thoughts on the
applicability of [[m:Wiki is not paper]] to Wikipedia.
In the section headed "No size limits", someone says it should be okay to
have pages for every "Simpsons" character, and even pages for every
episode. This is followed by Jimbo saying, "I agree with this one
completely."
I take this to mean that there is barely any limit on the triviality of a
subject that could be allowed to have its own Wikipedia article. With
apologies to "Simpsons" fans if this is blasphemy... ;) As I interpret it,
it's saying that pretty much any subject could be covered - within the
usual constraints of NPOV and verifiability, of course.
So we could include people and events that have not had significant impact
on a global or even a national level, but which maybe only affected a
small group of people. As long as there is some coverage in published
sources, somewhere, we could use that to make an article on the subject.
If this is all terribly wrong, can we come up with a more definite policy,
saying what the criteria are for an article to be allowed, and amend
[[m:Wiki is not paper]] and the policy pages accordingly?
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+
This response is transferred from Wikitech where DM's posting appeared.
Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen wrote:
>On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>>>Isn't this already too late? You can only dual license copyleft material if all
>>>copyright holders agree to it. The people who have posted stuff so far on
>>>Wikipedia have posted it under GFDL exclusively.
>>>
>>I'm sure that most of them have never given any serious attention to the
>>licence details.
>>
>
>I can't believe I'm hearing this. I don't know what to say.
>
>I remember reading about how we're going to one day plug all history back into
>all articles, from the earlier software phases, because if we didn't we would
>be violating the license terms set by our contributers (GFDL).
>
>And now we're just going to brush it all aside? I'm outraged.
>
My statement was a simple statement of fact, not a brushing aside.
People just don't have the time or the expertise to wade through
endless texts of legalese. They just say yes, and hope for the best.
Under our law a contract by a child is not enforceable unless it's for
necessities, so if a child agrees to a software license as a matter of
contract it's unenforceable anyway. Provisions in a license to transfer
jurisdiction to a United States court are of dubious validity, and may
be contrary to a person's constitutional rights in his own country. If
the opportunity comes up that requires transferring software to a Cuban,
I will gladly ignore United States law because whatever transactions I
may have with a Cuban is absolutely no business of the United States.
Can you honestly say that you have read and fully understood all of
these licences? If yes, I'd love to be in a position to have you write
an exam on them.
>>>If we want to combine different licenses, we have to track down all
>>>contributers for each relevant article, and get their permisson. Otherwise,
>>>we're breaking GFDL.
>>>
>>Wouldn't that be just a little unrealistic? A more common sense
>>solution would be better.
>>
>
>Yes, this is unrealistic. This is why I said that it is probably too late to
>begin dual licensing Wikipedia content (except in the case of new articles).
>
>The more common sense solution (in that it is a realistic endeavour) is of
>course to remove all quotes. Frankly, there aren't that many there to begin
>with.
>
Removing all quotes is just as silly as seeking for everyone to provide
positive written consent. Negative consent might be easier. In other
words, you eMail all users at their last known address to outline the
proposed changes that will go into effect in (say) six months. You
invite them to respond within that time; failure to respond will imply
consent. In any consent system we still aren't saying what we will do
with the work of those who say no. How can we remove their
contributions without harming the contributions of others who have been
involved in the same article.
Not all quotes are a subject of fair use. Some really are in the public
domain, because they are that old. Who is going to take the time to
identify all the quotes for removal?
Ec
There's been a discussion for the past couple of days on <wikitech-l>
about copyright policy on Wikipedia (all languages,
but mostly focussing on [[en:]], [[de:]], and [[pl:]] for examples).
This grew out of a real technical question
(«Why doesn't the download tarball include images?»),
but it quickly turned into a policy discussion.
Thus, I'll be placing my replies to this thread here shortly,
and I encourage anybody interested in this to look at <wikitech-l>:
<http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/thread.html#4163>
and <http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-June/thread.html>,
or look for the Subject: lines appearing in this post.
-- Toby