User:Anthony DiPierro appears to be hell-bent to put the FDL to the test.
He has created a complete fork of the English Wikipedia called "McFly":
http://www.slashdotsucks.com:8080/wik/
None of the individual articles make any mention of Wikipedia nor of the
FDL. Only the main page does, but not exactly in desirable form either. It
does not link to Wikipedia, instead it contains the text:
"by Andre Engels, Bryan Derksen, Brion Vibber, Michael Hardy,
Vicki Rosenzweig, Anthony DiPierro, thousands of Wikipedians,
and various others worldwide"
And regarding the FDL:
Copyright (c) 2004 Anthony DiPierro. [Standard FDL short version follows.]
Warning: this license extends solely to those parts of this document which
are copyright by Anthony DiPierro, who makes no claims as to the license
status of other document parts. Use at your own risk!
To summarize
1) Neither the McFly main page nor individual pages link back to Wikipedia
or to its page histories
2) The main page does *not* state that the content which is not written by
Anthony is licensed under the FDL.
We have to determine whether Wikipedia as a whole is "the document" or
whether individual articles are. In my opinion, the English Wikipedia is
no more a single document than the combined English and German Wikipedias
are -- the English Wikipedia is an aggregation of separately FDL-licensed
articles. This is clear because each document has a separate "history"
section, a separate license footer, and most documents have different
contributors.
Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation. If he refuses
to make the necessary changes I strongly recommend taking legal action as
otherwise this could easily become a precedent for third parties to use
Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should probably send a
warning letter anyway because of the "this license extends solely .."
part.
The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without legal standing. I
therefore would like to ask Alex in particular to take a look at this case
and help in preparing the necessary letter.
When I temp-banned Anthony for vandalism a few days ago I knew that he was
a troll. But this goes beyond simple trolling. Anthony's actions here
could do serious long-term damage to our project, and we need to quickly
respond.
Regards,
Erik
(I am not a lawyer.)
I tend to find Delirium's interpretation most straightforward, probably in
no small part because it is rather faithful to the letter of the license.
But then, I assume that in the U.S. context, there is a tendency that courts
allow some (unspecified) degree of liberty to follow only spirit of the
license and not the letter. And I think it is not easy to argue one practice
(say Wikipedians) is okay in light of the spirit and the other (say, Mcfly
users and Anthony) is not. One such sign is that we do not agree if linking
back to the original article would satisfy the requirement to preserve
history section. We do not agree if five authors should be listed, either.
But that aside, I wonder if there is a chance Anthony's practice is indeed
rather literally faithful to the license. (I admit that I didn't experience
what some of you guys did with him who is allegedly a disturbing troll, but
I am hoping you can regard the following another devil's advocate).
Regarding the "warranty disclaimer" part:
It may be interpreted as saying that some articles and images are wholly or
in part non-GFDL materials such as fully copyrighted materials under fair
use, simple copyvio that is not detected yet, etc. The notice implies that
he did not check those things, and the users should.
Regarding the absense of GFDL notice on each page:
The GFDL section 6 allows anyone to combine documents. If he is doing that,
then it is okay that he replace the multiple license notices into just one.
That's why there is only one notice for the whole site.
Regarding authors' names:
it seems that Wikipedia does not have copyright notice.
The two possible places that a copyright notice could be located are at the
bottom of the page, and at Wikipedia:Copyright, but neither contains any
information who the authors are. In that case, it is not very unreasonable
not to preserve any copyright notice.
So I cannot really be sure if he is violating the license by not preserving
any copyright notice from Wikipedia contents.
Regarding history:
Wikipedia's page history subunit is also said to be not necessarily History
section as in the sense of GFDL. (See, for example, Wkipedia:verbatim
copying).
Of course, I am not a lawyer, and I could be wrong.
Regards,
Tomos
_________________________________________________________________
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Erik wrote:
>Under this interpretation, Anthony is clearly in violation.
>If he refuses to make the necessary changes I strongly
>recommend taking legal action as otherwise this could
>easily become a precedent for third parties to use
>Wikipedia content without giving proper credit. We should
>probably send a warning letter anyway because of the
>"this license extends solely .." part.
Yes. I agree this is a violation since our copyright policy page clearly
indicates what actions need to be done to satisfy the GNU FDL requirements.
Each article is headed by its own history section and is thus a separate work.
But I don't think legal action will be needed if Anthony uses an ISP to host
his website. All we need is a takedown letter sent to the ISP if Anthony
refuses.
>The way I know Anthony he won't listen to anyone without
>legal standing. I therefore would like to ask Alex in particular
>to take a look at this case and help in preparing the necessary
>letter.
IANAL and this is only my opinion, but I no longer trust what Alex has to say
about copyright law. He has on several occasions now indicated that Wikipedia
is not a copyrightable work! I think such a position is outrageous, but that is
just my opinion and not a statement of fact.
Alex wrote:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Do_fair_use_images_violate_the…
Excerpt:
|The fact is that words in a dictionary are not subject to copyright
|and if an encyclopedia is the conceptual extension of a dictionary
|applied to concepts, theories, facts, historical developments then
|if Wikipedia is truly collaborative writing then the work that is
|created will be so generic as to be beyond the powers of copyright.
I for one find it offensive to imply that what we do here is not sufficiently
creative to warrent copyright protection.
Delirium wrote:
>On the other hand, we've indicated intent to publish a paper
>version of the encyclopedia, which would very clearly be a
>single document. Or are we claiming it wouldnt' be? If each
>Wikipedia article is a separate document, any paper version
>we produce would have to have a list of five authors and the
>"history" section on *every single* article, which would take
>up a pretty large percentage of the total encyclopedia.
I don't think so. Just print out the network location of the original. If that
is not enough then we would eventually have to develop a bot that would extract
top 5 author info from each article and place it, along with the article's URL,
in the footer on each page in a small font. It would take one, maybe two lines
at the bottom of every page.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________
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-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
People anywhere in the world can exchange information and communicate
with one another with the Internet. Until all use the same language they
need to be able to understand each others languages.
I suggest a new Wikipedia with each article rewritten in more than one
language. For example, each sentence could be written in English with the
line below that in French, and the one below that in German. The wording
could be chosen so that it is easy to translate from one language to the
other.
There would be many problems to be solved. When the same article appears
with different subject headings for each language would all the headings
be in alphabetical order or would the articles with English titles be in
one group, the same article with French titles in another group, and
German headings in another group.
How many languages could be used in this way? Would five languages on
lines one above another be too confusing?
A given word can mean different things to different people. In writing
about games an article about chess would be well understood by most
readers, mention cricket and you are talking about a game in the UK and
an insect that chirps and jumps in the USA. Football...
Is it right to write about a religious rite in the Wikipedia?
What is your opinion?
Merritt L. Perkins
Hello,
Wikipedia's database is quite huge. But is not widening so fast. But it
would be changed when all the Wikipedians started creating common database.
The main problem is the difference of languages, but... I have an idea! :) I
know my idea will not be so easy to realize, but I would be very usefull.
The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages from all
over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a language
to store information.
Today we have some language translating applications, but they are not
perfect, because two things:
1. Some languages differ too much
2. Some words have many meanings, and theprogram doesn't know which one
shoulb be chosen.
By creating new language we would solve first problem. (I think we do not
have to create entirely new language, maybe modifying Esperanto would be
just enough). The second problem could be chosen by listing all the meanings
of words. For example for english language we could create file like this:
word number word meaning
--------------------------------
1 mind intellect
2 mind thoughts
3 mind a head
4 mind to object to
The translating would look like this:
I have written a sentence: "The study of logic trains the mind". Application
scans my sentence and asks in which meaning I used word "mind". Then I
choose from all "mind" meanings word "intellect". After explaining allthe
meanings by the writer the application saves it in it's own language in a
structure like this:
116117 6322 987672 1 312312
Where the numbers means word numbers.
Decompression would look like this:
I have asked the program to display the message in Polish. The application
loads file "polish.txt" and is looking for words with these numbers.
As a fourth word it loads word from line one (because word "mind" with
meaning "intellect" is in line 1 in all the languages, not only in English).
It finds all the words and displays them.
I know that writing down all the meanings of words is not easy. But if all
Wikipedians write just a few we would finish it very fast.
The hardest thing is to make the language, that describes in which time is
the sencence, what the order of words should be after translating to
language X and what after diplaying in Y, etc.
But I think this is possible and would make for eg. building the database of
Wikipedia much easier.
And not only this. There will be many applications for it.
Hope you understood what I mean. I know I may have made some mistakes (both
gramatically and logically)...
So- how do you like my idea? Do you think it's worth realizing?
Regards,
Talthen
(talthen(a)wp.pl)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tomasz Wegrzanowski" <taw(a)users.sf.net>
To: <wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 10:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?
...
> > Chinese is not this perfectly logical language Leibniz was hoping
> > for, but it's remain one of the best candidates for deaf people, if
> > one wish to reach universality.
>
> Don't confuse the Chinese language with the Chinese writing system.
> The former is just another language - no more and no less logical than
> Polish, Latin or Swahili. It's only the writing system that's any special.
You're right, I should have used "Chinese writing system".
> If you used Han characters for any other language, you'd be no less
> "logical" than with Chinese.
You may go a little far. There are many different Chinese languages
(ancient written, moderne written, spoken in Sichuan, spoken in Beijing) and
they all weave Chinese culture, and are waved by it. I read here that a
"perfect logical/universal language" (Pl/ul) would by possible. I'm not
sure. (Because of the vital link with culture) In fact, it may depends on
this: do you include C++ in languages?
On Wed, Feb 11, 2004 at 10:12:40PM +0800, Ruimu wrote:
> > >>>>> "t" == <talthen(a)wp.pl> writes:
> >
> > t> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular
> > t> languages from all over the world. This language would not be a
> > t> human language, but a language to store information.
> >
> > [[en:pasigraphy]]
>
> See also... Chinese language! Leibniz himself was hoping that Chinese
> would be a perfect universal language. In fact, most Chinese characters
> (around 80% I guess) are both phonograms and ideograms (one part gives an
> idea of the sound, one part gives an idea of the meaning, and phonetic part
> can be chosen according to the meaning) but the core and might of this
> language still is its lack of grounding on phonetics. Therefore, Chinese
> people from different provinces can communicate despite their strongly
> different dialects... with the finger (writing characters in the air or on
> the palm). Because of the phonetic "rift", languages grounded on phonetics
> are less stable in time and space (for example, French written language is
> very far from the spoken one and you often have to learn 1) how to write a
> word, 2) how to prononce it).
>
> Chinese is not this perfectly logical language Leibniz was hoping for,
> but it's remain one of the best candidates for deaf people, if one wish to
> reach universality.
Don't confuse the Chinese language with the Chinese writing system.
The former is just another language - no more and no less logical than Polish,
Latin or Swahili. It's only the writing system that's any special.
If you used Han characters for any other language, you'd be no less "logical"
than with Chinese.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Evan Prodromou" <evan(a)wikitravel.org>
To: <wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?
> >>>>> "t" == <talthen(a)wp.pl> writes:
>
> t> The idea is to create new language, based on most popular
> t> languages from all over the world. This language would not be a
> t> human language, but a language to store information.
>
> [[en:pasigraphy]]
See also... Chinese language! Leibniz himself was hoping that Chinese
would be a perfect universal language. In fact, most Chinese characters
(around 80% I guess) are both phonograms and ideograms (one part gives an
idea of the sound, one part gives an idea of the meaning, and phonetic part
can be chosen according to the meaning) but the core and might of this
language still is its lack of grounding on phonetics. Therefore, Chinese
people from different provinces can communicate despite their strongly
different dialects... with the finger (writing characters in the air or on
the palm). Because of the phonetic "rift", languages grounded on phonetics
are less stable in time and space (for example, French written language is
very far from the spoken one and you often have to learn 1) how to write a
word, 2) how to prononce it).
Chinese is not this perfectly logical language Leibniz was hoping for,
but it's remain one of the best candidates for deaf people, if one wish to
reach universality.