Gregory Maxwell:
But you can't draw nice little boxes around
'communities', in effect
trying to achieve this additional restriction in our licensing will
grant the right to the site operators, not to the community.
The community is identified by its name. As long as you are writing on
Wikipedia.org, you are writing as a member of the Wikipedia community.
If you leave that community and start writing somewhere else, this
doesn't change the fact that the material you wrote in the past was
written as a member of that community.
So, I disagree, you can very much draw a box around the community by
identifying it with its given name.
Of course, this was part of the intention of invariant
sections in the
GFDL which we quite rightfully realized were not good things to
include in our work... But yet here we go, wishing to reinvent them.
If you don't want any requirements, use the public domain as I do. But
if you do want requirements, these should be a reasonable reflection of
the interests of the community as a whole. I think CC-WIKI is the best
effort to date to address this.
So how do you address this situation: Wikimedia loses
its mind, puts
porno spam all over wikipedia. I create a fork called FreePedia, and
the entire community moves to FreePedia. ... Now we have to credit
Wikipedia? But why? the community is here?
First of all, no license grant precludes you from granting permission to
any partcular site to do what it likes. For instance, FreePedia in its
sign up form could ask users to put their past and present contributions
udner a particular license. If indeed the entire community moves,
everything is fine. Furthermore, such a scenario wouldn't alter the fact
that the content was originally written by members of the Wikipedia
community. So, stating that "originally this was written by members of
Wikipedia, but now many of them have split away from Wikipedia and
formed Freepedia, for [[these reasons]]" would be a historically
accurate statement, informative, and sufficient to comply with the
license. The achievements of the Wikipedia community, in its present
incarnation, should not be denied credit because of potentially
undesirable future incaranations.
There is no clear way to credit the community,
it's dishonest to claim
that by building in a credit to the Wikimedia Foundation operated site
that you are crediting the community.
I don't think it's dishonest at all, I think it's very accurate, even if
that community should fundamentally change in the future -- in the
present it is very much identified as "Wikipedia". Even if that should
change, this identification would still be a historical fact.
Sure that example is far out, but things like that are
possible.. For
a more realistic scenario, what happens if a substantial part of the
community leaves and the community has split in two. This certainly
has been seen on other wikis.
Acknowledging historical facts doesn't take anything away from anyone.
All that being said, I think it is completely reasonable to try to
improve the way in which CC-WIKI credits the community, and to trace the
community history as best as possible without placing onerous
requirements on third parties. I suggest you work with the Creative
Commons folk to make this happen:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Wiki
CC-Wiki doesn't make forking harder, it makes
making a completely
equal fork impossible.
I think that's a reasonable thing to do. Forks are *not* completely
equal. They take the work produced by thousands and try to do something
new with it.
It grants nothing to the community, because there
is no unambiguous way to even define what the community is...
That's what you say. I say starting by identifying it by name, and
trying to ease community transitions, is the way to go for wiki licensing.
Erik