Anthere wrote:

So the questions I would ask

• what rights does she have on pages ?

I specifically think of her personal page. Is a personal page somebody's property ? Intuitively, I would say yes, and I would say someone has the right to delete his own page as well as the talk page attached. What is the policy about that ? What is the "policy" about discussion pages ? Is one's content of a discussion page personal or not ?

• what can we do against a deletion campaign ? Is there a solution

other than Aoineko keeping restoring pages until she gets tired ? (in case you ask, she is probably not on a fixed IP)

• what about the threat of the articles finally revealing themselves

copyrighted ?

As the above related to a problem in the French Wikipedia, it seemed appropriate to answer in French.

Il me semble que tous nous qui contribuons à Wikipedia en n'importe quelle langue sommes prêts à être sévèrement critiqués et édités, même par des idiots. On abandonne l'espoir comme à la porte de l'enfer.

En contribuant on accepte la condition qu'on abandonne tous les droits d'auteur, tout en proclamant qu'on a le droit de contribuer ce qu'on contribue. La renonciation des droits d'auteur inclus donner le droit aux autres de changer ou critiquer selon leurs grés. Si ses contributions sonts collaboratives, on doit présumer que ses collaborateurs savaient à quoi serviraient leurs collaborations, et qu'ils étaient d'accord avec ce que faissait Mulot.

Les droits d'auteur seraient aussi abandonnés sur la page personnelle; cette page aussi appartient au grand public. Quand c'est une question de supprimer telle ou telle page, elle a le même droit de suppression que tout le monde et tout le monde a le même droit de restorer la page. Pour une page personnelle la question est plutot si ça vaut la peine de la garder. Pour la "talk page" qui l'accompagne on parle ici des contributions des autres; le contributeur ne les commence guère soi-même. Si Mulot reclame quoi-que-soit des droits sur ces articles, ça suit qu'elle doit respecter les droits d'auteur de ces critiques.

Au niveau pratique tout participant a les moyens d'effacer les pages de tous les autres - (à l'exception seul de quelques pages essentielles au bon fonctionement du système). Dans une bataille de suppression contre restoration, c'est souvent le plus tenace qui gagne. C'est encore plus évident quand il n'y a qu'une personne pour representer chaque point de vu. Alors la solution est plus claire quand plusieurs membres de la communauté s'occupent de restorer les suppressions.

Pour le moment je ne peus considérer la menace de révéler les copyrights de ses articles que des cries d'un tigre sans dents. Bien entendu, ça peut ouvrir un grand nombre de questions, dont la plupart remonte sur la question de si elle violait elle-même les droits de quelqu'un d'autre. Aussi, si les doutes sont portées sur les articles, les Wikipédiens qui considèrent que ces articles contiennent de bonnes informations peuvent toujours les réécrire d'une façon qui ne violera plus les droits d'auteur de personne. Il faut toujours se rappeler que les copyrights n'ont rien à faire à l'information, mais à la façon de l'exprimer.

Eclecticology

Anthere wrote:

We have a little issue on the fr.wikipedia, and I wondered whether that kind of pb already occurred to you (probably did), and what you would do about it.

Some time ago, a new user, Mulot, joined us. She started many articles all related to religion. These articles were apparently results of collaborations between her and other people she is related to. Very valuable stuff imho. However, it appears that she doesnot fit with the wiki project very well (hum, she got pretty hot with our comments and modifications, though frankly light). Today, she just blew the lid off (so to speak, would you say that ?). Put all her articles in the list “to be deleted”. And said she wanted all of them to be deleted, as well as the talk pages.

[...]

So the questions I would ask

•     what rights does she have on pages ?
  

Under US copyright law, anything you write is your intellectual property and the copyright is owned by you unless you explicitly give or sell it away. I believe EU copyright law is the same in this respect, so there oughtn't to be any strange complications due to location of the author vs location of the server.

BUT... for anything she submitted to Wikipedia, she implicitly agreed to license it under the GFDL by not ignoring this message:

IMPORTANT : Toutes les contributions Wikipedia sont publies sous la license "GNU Free Documentation License". Si vous n'acceptez pas que votre article soit modifi et redistribu sans votre autorisation, ne nous l'envoyez pas. Vous nous promettez galement d'tre l'auteur de cet article, ou de l'avoir recopi d'une source de donnes du domaine public. N'UTILISEZ PAS SANS PERMISSION DES DONNEES PROTEGEES PAR DES DROITS D'AUTEUR !!

The license can't really be withdrawn as far as I can tell; she can still do whatever she wants with her original text, but can't legally force Wikipedia to remove her material *unless she can prove that the license was not valid*. (Ie, that she did in fact not own the copyright and thus could not license it under GFDL, or possibly that the click-through license notice was not really binding.)

I'm not a lawyer, though.

I specifically think of her personal page. Is a personal page somebody’s property ? Intuitively, I would say yes, and I would say someone has the right to delete his own page as well as the talk page attached. What is the policy about that ? What is the “policy” about discussion pages ? Is one’s content of a discussion page personal or not ?

Technically, personal and discussion pages are under the same GFDL license as the rest of the site. Someone duplicating Wikipedia (say, mirroring the site or pressing CD-ROM versions) would be free to include that material, or even reuse and modify it.

But as they're not _encyclopedia articles_ and are outside the primary purpose of the encyclopedia, I say it's perfectly fine if someone wants to delete their own personal page or their contributions on talk pages. (Whereas deleting an _article_ is detrimental to the project, and therefore rude and controversial.)

•     what can we do against a deletion campaign ? Is there a 
  

solution other than Aoineko keeping restoring pages until she gets tired ? (in case you ask, she is probably not on a fixed IP)

•     what about the threat of the articles finally revealing 
  

themselves copyrighted ? To say the least, I am very troubled

If she in fact did not own the copyright and was not legally able to license her contributions under GFDL, we can't keep them. Of course, that would be equally true if she were still in love with the project!

If there's really doubt in the matter, it might be worthwhile to rewrite the articles from scratch using the originals only as sources of information. This should both be unambiguously legal and soothe her anger.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)