On 6/30/05, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think 'questions' are a good solution to the lack of information in the statements because we can not expect a large enough audience to read the discussion.
The lack of information in the statements can be explained by the 1000 character limit on those. I disagree about the questions not being a good solution though. Last year, I only wrote my candidate statement after the questions were asked because that process highlighted what points were actually important to the community.
What is your long-term position with respect to the GFDL, particularly with respect to attribution?
My position is that the GFDL, as it currently stands, is almost impossible to adhere to for modified versions. I did already make some comments about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Angela/Election_questions_2005
Work is underway to make the process of reusing the content much simpler.
Specifically, I've read the new CC-wiki license and I'm very concerned that it creates a special right for site operators (as opposed to first editors or publishers).
I don't feel that the draft license at http://creativecommons.org/drafts/wiki_0.5 which has the requirement to attribute the original site gives that site any special rights. It isn't actually a new license, but a re-branded version of the cc-by-sa with the only major difference being that the wiki is attributed rather than the authors. In practice, this is how people are already interpreting the GFDL. I am aware of very few mirrors who credit the authors rather than simply crediting "Wikipedia" and linking to the original article.
Obviously Wikipedia could never be licensed as CC-wiki, and I have great faith that the Free Software Foundation would not make unwise changes to later versions of the GFDL... but I think that we would all benefit from finding out exactly what changes the board would request on our behalf.
The only request has been the fairly general one of making the license easier to understand. Personally, I would not want anything that would remove the rights of authors, which seems to be what you are implying might happen.
I feel confident that the community will not tolerate a change to the licensing which grants Wikimedia special legal rights which would inhibit the ability of the community to fork should the board somehow lose its mind and act against what the community feels is its best interest.
I can't imagine any way in which later versions of the GFDL would do that beyond what the current version does. Wikimedia doesn't control the GFDL, and is far from being the only user of it. Also, if the changes made by the FSF were so awful you wanted to fork, you could still do so under the terms of the old license. Current content can be reused under the current license, even after a new version is introduced. Because of this, you can be fairly confident that any adoption of a new version of the license would have to be approved by the community, and not only by the Board.
If you have specific requirements for what should or should not be part of the next license, it would be useful to make those at a page such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:GFDL_upgrade (or the page on meta linked to there by pcb21 that has not yet been created) so this can feed into any discussions between Wikimedia and the FSF.
This would require that the license not provide a special attribution loophole that allows only attributing to the site where the material was originally created. I would like a direct assurance that the board members will make no attempt to achieve such a change for GFDL-licensed content on Wikipedia, Commons, or Wikibooks.
In practice, this is already being done as I mentioned above. The section at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Example_notice seems to be widely supported by the community at the English Wikipedia, and a similar statement exists on other projects (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lizenzbestimmungen#Praktische_Anwendung_in_Online-Medien for example). If this is not the case, then the community needs to make a decision to change the wording, which all contributors are currently agreeing to (since that copyrights page is linked from the edit page).
However, perhaps the fact that the authors are attributed in the page history, which is linked from the Wikipedia article that the mirrors are being asked to link to, is seen as sufficient attribution. I wouldn't agree to anything which allowed the complete removal of that attribution, but allowing a situation where readers had to make a few clicks to get to it, in order to make re-using the content easier, would not necessarily be something I would oppose.
I'd also like to know how each board member thinks the board to incorporate community input into licensing-related discussions.
The main issue here seems to be the next version of the GFDL, which neither the board nor the Wikimedia community has any control over. In terms of discussions prior to a new license, I would hope anyone interested would contribute their opinions on the page I previously linked, or on meta to make it more international, or on any of the relevant mailing lists. The more important question might be how the discussions are managed after a new version of the GFDL is introduced. I don't know if the FSF release draft versions as the CC do. If they do, this would be an ideal opportunity for the Wikimedia communities, as well as for anyone else using the license, to have an input into this discussion. If that is not the case, then there will need to be discussion after the release of GFDL 2.0 whereby the community as a whole could decide whether it was appropriate to change to that new license. Imposing a new version without any sort of community discussion and consensus is something I aim to avoid.
I believe that most people would agree that the use of our content could be enhanced by some degree of carefully thought out change, but I know I'd like to have the ability to provide input; for example, my point on the non-negotiability of the legal ease of forking.
Perhaps you and others with opinions on this could form some sort of special interest group (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special_interest_group) where these issues can be discussed, agreed upon, and then presented to the FSF in a more formal way. Do you think that could be a useful way to ensure input on this rather than relaying opinions only through the Board?
Angela.