On 6/30/05, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
With CC-wiki this wouldn't be the case at all. My fork would be a second class citizen. Even if all the editors moved to edit on Gregpedia, people would still need to credit www.wikipedia.org for the material.
Material written on Wikipedia would be credited to the Wikipedia community. Material written on Gregpedia would be credited to the Gregpedia community. This seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me and does nothing to preclude you from running and operating your fork, it simply notes the historical fact that your content was originally created by a different community, rather than misrepresenting it as originating with you.
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.
You are correct that under the terms of the GFDL, I do not have to mention Wikipedia with a single word. I can, in fact, import the author histories into my Foopedia and create a new site that seems to have written 610,000 articles out of nowhere. I can even pretend that all these users have accounts on my site and import their user pages (if they have added "originally from .." templates, I can remove those). Many users will go to Foopedia and get the impression that I, as founder and operator, have made this thing happen, and that thousands of people have worked for/with me. They might even get the impression that all these people are right-wingers because I have Republican party advertising all over Foopedia.
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.
It's a silly argument to claim that someone could claim to be the actual author of the work, the contributions are right there.. Many people edit with their offline names (and hopefully those who don't should realize the weaker attribution representation it gives them).
I agree that freedom can bring unfavorable things, this is unfortunate, but it is not a reason to eschew freedom.
Now, I would argue that this would be a gross misrepresentation of the historical facts, and that, if you want any licensing at all, a fair and reasonable license should acknowledge the community origins of the content, rather than allowing implicit or explicit false attribution to an entirely different community.
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?
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.
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.
Wikipedia, however, is not just a bunch of random people doing things that they would be doing anyway if Wikipedia didn't exist. It is people collaborating in a specific framework, working together as members of a specific community under specific rules. CC-WIKI is not about granting special rights to an organization, it is about acknowledging the community identity over the identity of individual writers.
Right, but to suggest that the work wouldn't be possible without the Wikimedia Foundation is silly. There is a reason why copyright applies to a specific work and not to similar works of independent origins. It isn't like Jimbo was the first and only person to think of a GFDLed free content encyclopedia. (although, wow, what an amazing job everyone has done making it happen... Which is why we have a community)
As long as the emphasis is on community, rather than on organization, I think CC-WIKI is exactly the right approach.
I like crediting the community. But the community isn't a single object we can credit. To claim that we can is a gross oversimplification at best.
Many mirrors and forks are set up by people who are either not knowledgeable about licensing, or who do not have the resources to comply with the technical requirements (we do not make this easy for them).
I agree that we do not make it easy for them, we have even disabled features in our software which make it easier (credits at the bottom, though I presume for technical reasons rather than to discourage compliance). We make it easy to make illegal forks and suggest hyperlinks as a bandaid... while we slowly back away and disclaim all liability. It is not pretty.
Our webpages clearly say that other sites must follow the GFDL, and that our little bandaid isn't legal protection. We muddle the otherwise straightforward waters (to be legal, do what we do) by trying to get people to do the respectable thing and link back to us as well.. We don't even manage to give a consistant story on our webpages: Compare, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Users.27_rights_and_obliga... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verbatim_copying#History_Section
The latter is far more clear that our recommendation is legally questionable.
Some of the emails we send out to places asking for advice even omit the instructions for actual compliance entirely. We claim this is because it is too hard, but it really isn't "Do what we do" is sufficient.
It's fine if you argue that you feel individual authors deserve attribution over the community as a whole -- that is a legitimate position to hold, although I disagree with it. But if you claim that you want to make forking and mirroring easier, then you are misrepresenting your position, because it does the exact opposite. CC-WIKI makes forking simpler and acknowledges the work of the community as a whole rather than that of individual contributors.
Fundamentally *forking* is already easy, you grab our complete database dumps (rather than just one part of them). The storage requirements for the entire dumps are large, but a small amount of time with an awkscript can extract just the attribution data if the wish is only to provide that. Considering the amount of advertisements that some of the forks manage to cram in... I doubt they would have any troubles doing what they need to do.
CC-Wiki doesn't make forking harder, it makes making a completely equal fork impossible. It grants part of the essences of the exclusive copyright (the right to be credited) to another party simply by virtue of hosting a site. It grants nothing to the community, because there is no unambiguous way to even define what the community is...
On the other hand, changes to attribution requirements would make some forms of reproduction much easier. It is an interesting area to explore, but we shouldn't go down the road of creating special rights for site operators, or reinventing invariant sections.