Stan Shebs wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
On Wednesday, March 17, 2004, at 03:55 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I think there is universal support for this proposal, actually this proposal:
- Force the user to choose a license
- Force the user to fill out a field (or more?) indicating the
source 3. Write this on the page: {{msg:<NameOfLicense>}} 4. Additionally store the license and source information in a separate database field
My only concern about this approach is that most people don't understand anything about copyright. Asking them to choose a license under those circumstances is like rolling dice. It would be nice if the license choices were accompanied by a brief outline of the implications of each choice.
Or simply a "don't know". If a person doesn't really know about this stuff, I'd rather them say they don't know, than to try to pick an approximate match. A tricky way to help sniff out problem pics is to ask for the date of the picture too, then focus attention on "post-1923 don't knows".
A little admission of not knowing goes a long way. I agree that a little data about where and when these pictures come from would be very helpful. The failure to explain the origin of a submission is rapidly becoming a problem at Wikisource. The contributor is in the best position to know where his material comes from, and he owes a little due dilligence to the rest of the community. Regretably, many of the unsourced contributions probably are in the public domain, but anything more than some very basic tests are beyond the scope of what a reviewer should need to do.
Without going into details, I consider myself as having an aggressive attitude about what should be treated as in the public domain, but even an aggressive attitude needs facts to back it up.
Ec