Hi, I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Lars Aronsson, I live in [Sweden], and am a good friend of [LinusTolke], [Pinkunicorn], [Lisa], and [Mjausson]. In May this year I was active in the English, German, and Swedish Wikipedia using the signature [LA2]. I wrote several articles, including [Information Theory], [Book], and [Germany], but finally got tired of [Larry_Sanger]'s attitude and pulled out on May 21. My opinion was that different people could contribute a skeleton of new article headings and hypertext links, while others could contribute longer texts to each article, but Larry thought it was important that [Wikipedia is not a dictionary], so I left. I think Larry agrees with my conclusion that Nupedia grows too slowly because of an overly strict editorial policy, and that Wikipedia is a blessing. I think that Larry's criticism of my contributions to Wikipedia was a leftover from this unnecessary strictness, and rather than trying to explain this, I went away.
I have to confess I was the one who wrote that [Pittsburgh] is an "ugly" town and under [Nile] that "denial is a river in Egypt".
I think that Wikipedia (and Wiki technology in general) is one of the most interesting ideas I have met in the last few years. Rather than the [Open Directory Project], which only links to existing websites, Wikipedia tries to document all knowledge, whether already available on the Internet or not. This is the same idea that [Denis Diderot] worked on, moved to the [World Wide Web].
In 1991, my friend [LinusTolke] took the idea of [MUD] games (all of which were in [English language] at the time), and moved it to [Swedish language]. In 1992, I took the idea of [Project Gutenberg] and moved it to [Swedish language], calling it [Projekt Runeberg]. When the first NCSA Mosaic web browser came out in 1993, I was one of the few who had any contents already published.
Both LinusTolke and I are members of [Lysator], an students' computer club (and alumni organisation of sorts) at [Linkoping University].
In the fall of 2000, I started a free wireless networking mailing list (http://elektrosmog.nu/) in Sweden, and some of the members asked me to start a Wiki website for it, just like two U.S. free wireless projects have, [Personal Telco] and [SeattleWireless]. I thought about this, and also wanted to use Wiki for [Projekt Runeberg] and Scandinavian literature.
To get a better idea of how it works, I downloaded my own copy of the Usemod Wiki software, and started to experiment. I soon realized that there is true power in modifying the program itself, adding new features that saves work when writing articles. The program has a subroutine (a "sub" i Perl) named WikiToHTML that converts the ''special'' characters to HTML. For instance, it translates ISBN:0000 into a link to Amazon and Barnes&Noble, and RFC0000 to a link to faqs.org. I added a rule that makes a link to the USPTO database whenever I write uspat: followed by a U.S. Patent number. I modified the ISBN rule so that Swedish ISBN:91- numbers will link to Swedish online bookstores. I made a rule so that map: followed by a geographic latitude and longitude will create an inline image link to a map from mapblast.com. I could go on and add new rules. This is a dimension that I haven't seen explored in Wikipedia yet.
I set up my experimental wiki on August 31, and after a month I had a pretty decent website, all prompts translated to Swedish, and with a few hundred articles in it. I decided to keep this project, and on October 1, I gave it a proper Internet domain, http://susning.nu/ The slogan "skaffa dig en susning.nu" roughly translates into "get yourself a clue, now!"
This website hasn't been indexed by Google yet, and I am writing most of the articles myself. There are 1700 articles of which 200 are REDIRECTs, 1100 contain at least one comma, and 600 contain a map from Mapblast. This places my site slightly ahead of the German Wikipedia (900 comma articles), and way ahead of the Swedish Wikipedia (90 comma articles). I have one article for every municipality in Sweden, and several countries are covered. Very few of my articles are long, and there is no chance I can compete with the English Wikipedia.
I joined these two mailing lists (wikipedia-l, intlwiki-l) a week ago, and the discussion on translation links inspired me to implement this. Whenever I start an article like this:
En katt (engelska: cat) (tyska: Katze) är ett djur. i.e. A cat (German: Katze) (Swedish: katt) is an animal. or Eine Katze (Englisch: cat) (Schwedisch: katt) ist ein Tier.
the words in parenthesis are made into links to that language's Wikipedia. This way, if one reader thinks that my website provides a too simple explanation of what a cat is, and they do understand English, they can click on "cat" and get the much longer article from the English Wikipedia. This is great. On the other hand, if they click on Katze, they will arrive at the blank webpage http://de.wikipedia.com/wiki/Katze and will have the chance to write that missing article in German. The best part is that the syntax is user-friendly and not overly {{{complicated}}} for anybody to understand. You are welcome to have a look around. Here are some example articles:
http://susning.nu/Afghanistan http://susning.nu/Bok http://susning.nu/Dardanellerna http://susning.nu/IEEE_802.11 http://susning.nu/Perl http://susning.nu/Pittsburgh http://susning.nu/TIFF http://susning.nu/Tyskland http://susning.nu/UNIX http://susning.nu/Upphovsr%e4tt
As a "good fences make for good neighbors" principle, I run my own website independent of what goes on in the Wikipedia project. I just link to your articles, and my readers can contribute to and benefit from your work. I think this "scales" well, and that is very comforting to a programmer like me. I think that we can learn a lot from each other, and have a loose form of cooperation or mutual, peaceful coexistance, even if we are not in the same project. This is how it has worked between me and Project Gutenberg's Michael Hart over the last eight years.
I joined these two mailing lists (wikipedia-l, intlwiki-l) a week ago, and the discussion on translation links inspired me to implement this. Whenever I start an article like this:
En katt (engelska: cat) (tyska: Katze) är ett djur. i.e. A cat (German: Katze) (Swedish: katt) is an animal. or Eine Katze (Englisch: cat) (Schwedisch: katt) ist ein Tier.
the words in parenthesis are made into links to that language's Wikipedia.
I'm not entirely happy with this mechanism. If there were 15 articles about cat in different languages and I wanted to add a 16th, I had to insert a link to my new article in 15 different places. I would feel a bit uneasy if I had to insert such a link, say, into a chinese page.
In your example, there are three pages which have to contain the following information in an *explicit form*:
(1) katt(se)=cat(en) and katt(se)=Katze(de) (2) cat(en)=Katze(de) and cat(en)=katt(se) (3) Katze(de)=cat(en) and cat(de)=katt(se)
This is the *real information-content* of the above:
(A) katt(se)=cat(en) (B) cat(en)=Katze(de)
And this is the way from (A), (B) to (1), (2), (3):
I. Given (A) and (B) the system can *infer* that (C) katt(se)=Katze(de) (following the laws of symmetry and transitivity). II. And all the other entries are redundant duplicates.
My point is, that the human editors should only have to provide (and maintain!) the minimal information (A) and (B) and the *computer* should expand it first to the explicit form (A), (B), (C) and then to the fully redundant form (1), (2), (3) *at runtime* (i.e. when the article is viewed) and *not* by modifying the source-code.
Note to I.) To provide (A) to (C), we only need someone who understands (A) swedish and english and another one who understands (B) english and german - and that's all. (Note that *any* two of A to C are sufficient.) While the explicit form requires that everyone has to deal with every language (at some level).
Note to II.) To avoid redundancy is a golden rule of information science. Duplicates are a maintainance-hell.
Here's my conception of the implementation: The links to the different languages should not be part of the viewable body of the article, but part of the headline or footer (which is generated by wiki). A link like (A) can be realized using the upcoming wiki-variables (please read the posting of Magnus Manske). The variable could be inserted into the swedish *or* the english article at any place (tough it would be useful to put them all together at the beginning), but they would not be directly visible in the text. They only provide the information (A) to the system. Then wiki can build the language-alternatives according to (I) and (II) and show them in the header or the footer when the page is viewed.
--ThomasHofer
On October 15, Thomas Hofer wrote:
Eine Katze (Englisch: cat) (Schwedisch: katt) ist ein Tier. [...]
I'm not entirely happy with this mechanism. If there were 15 articles about cat in different languages and I wanted to add a 16th, I had to
Today this problem doesn't exist. There is no point in linking to the French, Dutch, or Spanish Wikipedias, because they only have a few hundred articles, and that just isn't useful.
My intention was not to find the ultimate solution or make anybody "entirely happy". All I wanted was to test an idea that allows me to link to the two existing useful Wikipedias in English and German.
Here's my conception of the implementation: The links to the different languages should not be part of the viewable body of the article, but part of the headline or footer (which is generated by wiki). A link like (A) can be realized using the upcoming wiki-variables (please read the posting of Magnus Manske).
Tell me when you have a working prototype, and I will try it.
On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Lars Aronsson wrote:
while others could contribute longer texts to each article, but Larry thought it was important that [Wikipedia is not a dictionary], so I left. I think Larry agrees with my conclusion that Nupedia grows too slowly because of an overly strict editorial policy, and that Wikipedia is a blessing. I think that Larry's criticism of my contributions to Wikipedia was a leftover from this unnecessary strictness, and rather than trying to explain this, I went away.
First, Lars, thank you for your support of the Wikipedia project! I'm glad finally to connect a name (and website) to a Wikipedia nickname (LA2).
A brief clarification is in order. I have rarely thought of Wikipedia as the solution to Nupedia's problems (in that case, Wikipedia ought to *replace* Nupedia, which I don't think is true). I have thought of Wikipedia, rather, as a *complementary alternative* to Nupedia. The strictness, per se, of Nupedia's editorial policy doesn't seem to me the best explanation of why Nupedia hasn't been growing faster; I think it's better explained by the fact that the system has been hugely overburdened by bottlenecks. Under the newest proposal developed on Nupedia-L and developing further on Advisory-L, Nupedia's editorial policy will continue to be very strict--only the best work will be accepted--but there will be far fewer bottlenecks. We'll simply be reverting to a typical academic review system. One shouldn't assume that this means we'll be more open to substandard work.
As for my criticism of *some* (only some!) of your contributions to Wikipedia, Lars, I apologize if I was too abrupt and if I seemed rude. That was merely a function of my wanting to get as much work done on the project as possible (something that I can only hope other people, who I have treated in an equally peremptory way, have understood). I am coming around to a subtler understanding of the virtue of efficiency--efficiency is great, but not at the expense of the virtues of clear communication and politeness! For the record (and please don't take it personally that I say this :-) ), I still do oppose one-liner stub articles for the English Wikipedia. I think we can reasonably and should expect better than that--and generally speaking, while we now still do get plenty of stubs, they have rather more information than that, which is fine as a way to get started.
By the way, if you find my attitude offensive, why not e-mail me privately and we can try to resolve the problem amicably? I think it's entirely possible that there was simply a misunderstanding or several between us. But if discussion of the relative merits of personal styles is conducted in a public forum, it becomes a sort of game, a defense of competing egos, which (I hope you can agree) is tedious for others and stressful for us--and completely *unnecessary* for everyone. I think this would be a good rule (in fact, I'm going to add it to [[rules to consider]]--if a debate starts to get personal, take it to e-mail. This is something that Jimbo has suggested doing before, and the more I consider it the more I like it.
I think that Wikipedia (and Wiki technology in general) is one of the most interesting ideas I have met in the last few years. Rather than the [Open Directory Project], which only links to existing websites, Wikipedia tries to document all knowledge, whether already available on the Internet or not. This is the same idea that [Denis Diderot] worked on, moved to the [World Wide Web].
Yes! Well said!
...online bookstores. I made a rule so that map: followed by a geographic latitude and longitude will create an inline image link to a map from mapblast.com. I could go on and add new rules. This is a dimension that I haven't seen explored in Wikipedia yet.
This is all great and exactly on target.
You might or might not know that Magnus Manske and others have been working on a new version of the software that will run Wikipedia, in PHP, found here:
http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/fpw/wiki.phtml
One main reason we are excited about this (aside from the fact that it will be better software for our purposes, when it's done) is that it will live and be developed publicly; no longer will we have to wait for overworked Bomis programmers to make improvements to Wikipedia software.
I set up my experimental wiki on August 31, and after a month I had a pretty decent website, all prompts translated to Swedish, and with a few hundred articles in it. I decided to keep this project, and on October 1, I gave it a proper Internet domain, http://susning.nu/ The slogan "skaffa dig en susning.nu" roughly translates into "get yourself a clue, now!"
I noticed that the Swedish Wikipedia ( http://sv.wikipedia.com/ ) is one of the few in which some word strings have been properly translated. You and others can help out by using the following (very cool) translation page:
http://www.wikipedia.com/translation.cgi
This website hasn't been indexed by Google yet, and I am writing most of the articles myself. There are 1700 articles of which 200 are REDIRECTs, 1100 contain at least one comma, and 600 contain a map from Mapblast. This places my site slightly ahead of the German Wikipedia (900 comma articles), and way ahead of the Swedish Wikipedia (90 comma articles). I have one article for every municipality in Sweden, and several countries are covered. Very few of my articles are long, and there is no chance I can compete with the English Wikipedia.
Is your work released under the GNU FDL? I'm obviously very sorry that you felt it necessary to start a project wholly unaffiliated with Wikipedia (popularly known as "forking" :-) ). We would, of course, like to be able to use your work on the Swedish Wikipedia and perhaps even in future Nupedia articles in Swedish.
Perhaps the best question to ask is: what would it take for us to be able to persuade you to use (a greatly improved version of) http://sv.wikipedia.com/ ? It's almost certain that we will be able to accommodate whatever wishes you might have. Of course, it's entirely possible that *nothing* would persuade you. But at least one good reason is that there are the resources of many, many people at work on Wikipedia. Also, your project's association with Wikipedia (and therefore also with Nupedia) can only be to the benefit of the project in terms of credibility and general public support and press coverage. We are now, as this mailing list demonstrates, focusing resources on setting up and supporting the non-English Wikipedias properly.
As a "good fences make for good neighbors" principle, I run my own website independent of what goes on in the Wikipedia project.
"Good fences make for good neighbors" is true enough in foreign policy, but I'm not sure the principle works so well when dealing with open source and open content projects; in that case, it's called "forking"...which is not always the best policy (but, of course, sometimes it is).
I just link to your articles, and my readers can contribute to and benefit from your work. I think this "scales" well, and that is very comforting to a programmer like me. I think that we can learn a lot from each other, and have a loose form of cooperation or mutual, peaceful coexistance, even if we are not in the same project. This is how it has worked between me and Project Gutenberg's Michael Hart over the last eight years.
There is one problem, namely, that http://sv.wikipedia.com/ already exists, and the chances of our stopping are virtually zero. Our project and yours can indeed continue to coexist and to use each other's work (well, assuming that you use the GNU FDL, that is, or some other compatible license), but I'm not sure what the point of this would be; I am skeptical that the overall project of creating a high-quality, dynamic, open content encyclopedia in the Swedish language would benefit from this situation.
Anyway, thanks for telling us about your project, and I'm sure we'll all keep thinking about it.
Larry Sanger
Larry Sanger wrote:
Our project and yours can indeed continue to coexist and to use each other's work (well, assuming that you use the GNU FDL, that is, or some other compatible license)
There's a point that I don't understand: Wikipedia has no records about copyright-holders in its diffs and changelogs. When I create or edit a page, the corporation that runs Wikipedia is the copyright-holder of all my changes - which minimizes copyright-troubles. (And gives the corporation the right to release modified or unmodified content under any other license if they want).
But what happens when I insert a FDL document from a third party?
Section 4 of the GNU FDL mentions as requirement for modified copies: "B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has less than five)."
As far as I understand this, we have to provide the names of the principal authors on each page we copy from a third party. Is this true? How do we handle this? What about the other requirements below:
"I. Preserve the section entitled "History", and its title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no section entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence."
"J. Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission."
"K. In any section entitled "Acknowledgements" or "Dedications", preserve the section's title, and preserve in the section all the substance and tone of each of the contributor acknowledgements and/or dedications given therein."
--ThomasHofer
Thomas Hofer wrote:
There's a point that I don't understand: Wikipedia has no records about copyright-holders in its diffs and changelogs. When I create or edit a page, the corporation that runs Wikipedia is the copyright-holder of all my changes - which minimizes copyright-troubles. (And gives the corporation the right to release modified or unmodified content under any other license if they want).
If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?
As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by: 1. Putting the material under a Free Documentation License 2. Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
Andre Engels wrote:
If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?
As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by:
- Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
- Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
I think that this view is essentially correct.
As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what you have personally written, including publishing the articles in another forum, another form, etc., etc. You can even put your own articles together in a proprietary book or website.
Other people, who find your work at Wikipedia, must use it subject to the Wikipedia license, which is the GNU FDL as applied to wikipedia.
I think that everyone agrees, uncontroversially, with the spirit of what is to be done. I think that the following points are uncontroversial, and how to make sure all this fits the license is a separate question.
1. Authors can continue to do anything they like with their own work.
2. Wikipedia functions as it does now, i.e. with a revision history kept for working purposes, but not with any particular concern for authorship or historical record keeping.
3. 3rd parties (i.e. not the author, and not wikipedia itself) can take and use the content in pretty much any way, but must adhere to the "invariant section" rule that they link back to the project (in html media) or credit the project (in paper media, for example). We want Yahoo to take our encyclopedia and republish it as the "Yahoo Knowledge Base" or whatever, but to have every page link back to us.
You wrote (Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2001 20:42):
Andre Engels wrote:
If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?
As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by:
- Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
- Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could
reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
I think that this view is essentially correct.
As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what you have personally written, including publishing the articles in another forum, another form, etc., etc. You can even put your own articles together in a proprietary book or website.
IANAL, but when I re-think it I tend to agree to this view, too. When I wrote my last posting, I thought it was clear that the copyright goes to Bomis Inc, because of this entry in the Wikipedia-FAQ:
Q. Who owns Wikipedia?
A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is [Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNU Free Documentation License, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)
I think the whole situation is very unclear. If each Wikipedia-author is really copyright-holder of his material, we have at least to keep track of the authorships of the diffs, or else (IMHO, again IANAL) we violate the FDL. The current logs are not sufficient, we would need real accounts with mandatory real-world user-identification (*if* the author wants to retain his rights).
--ThomasHofer
Obviously, we don't want to make it seem as if Wikipedia is claiming the right to call itself *the source* of *whatever* it publishes, so that any content that happens to appear in Wikipedia cannot appear elsewhere without being credited to Wikipedia. In that case, any publishing of Shakespeare's plays and Lee Crocker's poker articles would have to include a source notice pointing to Wikipedia! Surely the GNU FDL doesn't imply that. If it does, it needs work.
I don't know how to resolve the situation (I'll leave that to people who know more about licensing) but I do want to help reassure people that Wikipedia *is not* trying to arrogate to itself rights over work that it shouldn't have. All we want to do is to make sure that Wikipedia articles do remain free, and that we are credited with articles that (here, I'm guessing) were created or developed specifically for Wikipedia.
Maybe the best way to approach it is by saying that each person grants Wikipedia, and people who source material from Wikipedia, the right to distribute their material under the GNU FDL. Hmm...
Very puzzling.
Larry
On Tue, 16 Oct 2001, Thomas Hofer wrote:
You wrote (Dienstag, 16. Oktober 2001 20:42):
Andre Engels wrote:
If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?
As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by:
- Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
- Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could
reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
I think that this view is essentially correct.
As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what you have personally written, including publishing the articles in another forum, another form, etc., etc. You can even put your own articles together in a proprietary book or website.
IANAL, but when I re-think it I tend to agree to this view, too. When I wrote my last posting, I thought it was clear that the copyright goes to Bomis Inc, because of this entry in the Wikipedia-FAQ:
Q. Who owns Wikipedia?
A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is [Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNU Free Documentation License, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)
I think the whole situation is very unclear. If each Wikipedia-author is really copyright-holder of his material, we have at least to keep track of the authorships of the diffs, or else (IMHO, again IANAL) we violate the FDL. The current logs are not sufficient, we would need real accounts with mandatory real-world user-identification (*if* the author wants to retain his rights).
--ThomasHofer [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
lsanger@nupedia.com wrote:
All we want to do is to make sure that Wikipedia articles do remain free, and that we are credited with articles that (here, I'm guessing) were created or developed specifically for Wikipedia.
Right. If it weren't for these two desires, we'd just simplify things by having a _totally_ wide open license, saying "take this and do with it as you will".
------- ************************************************* * http://www.wikipedia.com/ * * You can edit this page right now! * *************************************************
Q. Who owns Wikipedia?
A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is [Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNU Free Documentation License, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)
I think this is a very unclear explanation. I didn't write it. I suppose Larry did. There is really nothing at all non-traditional about copyright ownership under a free license. I mean, free licensing is merely one very generous way to exercise one's rights under copyright law.
Where is this likely to come up? I can think of a few types of disputes that might arise...
1. Someone gets mad at the community and demands to take all their own work out of the wikipedia. This seems impossible for them to justify, given the fact that they acknowledge release under the FDL upon input into the site in the first place.
2. Bomis (meaning me) decides to publish the work in a proprietary manner, i.e. publish a modified version while forbidding others to copy and further modify it. If Bomis owns the content, Bomis could do this. If individuals own the content, then Bomis can't do this. As a practical matter, it would be stupid for us to do this -- there doesn't seem to be any financial advantage to it that I can think of.
3. Microsoft (for example) decides to publish the work in a proprietary manner, i.e. publish a modified version while forbidding others to copy and further modify it. If Bomis owns the content, then Bomis has clear standing to sue them. If individuals own the content, then they have clear standing to sue them. In either case, if monetary damages look likely, financing a suit will not be difficult.
-----------
I think that the main thing we want to preserve is the simple operation of the community, and the ethos against authorship.
--Jimbo
---- ************************************************* * http://www.wikipedia.com/ * * You can edit this page right now! * *************************************************
Thomas has some very good questions. So far, this has not come up because we have not copied GNU FDL materials into the database. (Oh, except I did see some entries from a dictionary of computing that the owner gave us permission to use.)
It's a difficult question! We selected the GNU FDL license because it is indisputably "open source" or "free" (choose your religion! ;-)). But to a certain extent, it is "tighter" than we want it to be, as per the provisions Thomas mentions below.
Notice that all of the provisions mentioned can be omitted if the original author doesn't include them or insist on them. Within Wikipedia, we have generally had a strong social norm against the concept of "authorship". What I mean by this is that it is considered bad form to get annoyed at someone for changing "my" article. The best entries are semi-anonymous -- I mean, your name is there in the change log so people can thank you for your excellent work, but the article itself stands on its own.
Other little puzzlements of this kind are in the license if you mull it over. What is really needed, I suppose, is a license that is compatible (in some sense) with the GNU FDL, but which doesn't impose all the restrictions of the FDL.
The one thing that we don't want is to say that the stuff is in the _public domain_. The reason we don't want that is that it makes it possible for someone to take our work and make a _proprietary_ version simply by modifying it. I think that by and large the contributors wouldn't want that -- and I know that I wouldn't.
Also, we are currently using the "invariant section" bits in the license to require people like Yahoo or Altavista who may mirror our content to provide a link back to the main project. (This has not actually happened yet, but we hope that it will someday.)
P.S. to my last message. It occurs to me that "fork" isn't the right word. Since Lars has apparently not used any of sv.wikipedia.com's content, and since he isn't using the "Wikipedia" name, it's too far of a stretch to call http://susning.nu a "fork." It's just another implementation of the same concept.
wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org