Gareth Owen wrote: Still, I think there is something to it, and I have strong doubts that a wiki or similarly "wide-open" collaborative process could produce a great novel or play or poem. An encyclopedia is particularly well suited to the wiki process, because it isn't really _supposed_ to be individualistic in that way. _Greatness_ for an encyclopedia article involves a pretty healthy dose of "averaging" as one of it's essential components. Britannica sells a delightful volume of classic articles, many written by prominent people with an axe to grind. They're great essays, but as encyclopedia articles, to my mind they fall short significantly of the kind of neutrality that we're so good at. --Jimbo

Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)ctelco.net> writes: Ooh, scare quotes. Well, wikipedia is not a place for original research and theorising. Can I recommend Usenet. -- Gareth Owen "I love the wikipedia, but sometimes I get the impression that certain people on this list are very bored, and so argue about something when there's really bugger all to argue about. Edit some articles, for god's sake." -- LP

You're changing the subject. Which is that an excellent article written by a knowledgable person which CONFORMS TO THE ACCEPTED CANON OF KNOWLEDGE can be trashed back to the level of what the average users remember from their undergraduate courses. Fred

Optim- Propaganda can be brilliant. It can be convincing, touching you deep in your heart, forcing you to act, to do something about some horrible wrong that needs to be righted. Wikipedia does not work that way. Our articles are generally unemotional. NPOV sucks out the juice, the emotional adjectives, the manipulative imagery, the damning headlines. But NPOV is a different goal, and we definitely have the potential to attain brilliance in that particular goal. I want us to provide the most neutral presentation on controversial issues that is possible to get, with all the facts and arguments from both sides presented in a manner that is easy to understand. I want Wikipedia to be a tool for those who ask questions and are undecided about where the "truth" is, and I want us to be genuine and honest in helping people to search for their truth and find it. Above all, I want us to help people think for themselves, rather than telling them what to think. In many ways, I think these goals are more difficult to reach than to just create great propaganda. If you had told me a few years ago that I would be working with people who oppose homosexuality, abortion rights, evolutionary theory, separation of church and state, I would have taken that as an insult. But Wikipedia brings these people together in - not always, but often - reasonable discourse, united behind a common goal. The progress I have seen on some articles shows that this goal *can* be reached, that we *can* reach brilliance in areas where few have ever reached brilliance before. That our process will work is by no means self-evident. It requires constant discipline and oversight, and because we are in uncharted territory, we can and will make mistakes. But only those who do nothing do not make mistakes. And they will never experience the amazing feeling, that satisfaction that you get when you succeed in reaching a true, fair consensus where you know that, together, you have created something that is good. What is perceived as a brilliant piece of advocacy by those who already agree with the points made, or are on the fence, may be seen as mere propaganda by all others. The "average" tone of Wikipedia articles helps us to move the discussion to the rational level, so that an argument on abortion rights is no longer based on who has the most convincing embryo photos, but rather on the facts for and against the matter. We don't try to trick people. We are all seekers of truth, and we are all united behind that altruistic goal of helping one another to find it. And that, I believe, is true brilliance. Erik

Alex T. wrote: At the risk of treading into wikilegal-l ground again, I think it'll probably take a big shift in copyright law interpretation before something like Wikipedia is deemed uncopyrightable. It's true that facts and plain knowledge aren't copyrightable, but so far that's been interpreted mainly to mean things like lists of telephone numbers in a phone book. It's a pretty big jump from that to an encyclopedia, which is at the very least several orders of magnitude more creative. If nothing else, it takes a certain measure of creative prose to explain complex issues succinctly and clearly, as evidenced by the large amount of factual stuff out there that is neither succinct nor clear. -Mark

Recently I had the idea to create a "factpaedia": An encyclopaedia of facts. According to my idea, the factpaedia could serve as a source for translations, perhaps semi-automatic, between all wikipedias. It should work with XML. An XML factpaedia file could be like this: <FACTPAEDIA> <ARTICLE> <BIOGRAPHY> <TITLE>Mr. NoOne</TITLE> <SUMMARY>bla-bla-bla</SUMMARY> <PERSON-TITLE>Mr.</PERSON-TITLE> <NAME>NoOne</NAME> <BIRTH> <YEAR>8436</YEAR> <MONTH>34</MONTH> <DAY>3783</DAY> <WEEKDAY>Saturday</WEEKDAY> <PLACE>Lemuria</PLACE> </BIRTH> <CREDENTIALS> <EDUCATION> <UNDERGRAD>B.Sc.</UNDERGRAD> <GRAD>M.Sc.</GRAD> </EDUCATION> <OTHER> <MA>S.'.I.'.</MA> </OTHER> </CREDENTIALS> <PROFESSION>Writer</PROFESSION> <WORKS> <BOOK>Book 1</BOOK> <BOOK>Book 2</BOOK> <BOOK>Book 3</BOOK> <ESSAY>Essay 1</ESSAY> </WORKS> ... </BIOGRAPHY> </ARTICLE> </FACTPAEDIA> Is this file copyrightable? thnx, --Optim --- "Alex T." &lt;alex756(a)nyc.rr.com&gt; wrote: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/

Fred Bauder wrote: Ah, I see. Sounds like Maths and Computer Science aren't affected. :) Timwi

Fred Bauder wrote: Yeah, but notation is a convention and not a "fact" or "truth" or "knowledge". I don't think those Oxford Mathematicians generally thought their notation was any more "correct" or "true".

From: "Evan Prodromou" &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Ha, ha, very funny, bub-you. If it is just knowledge then it would fall into the public domain as the expression would be totally uncreative. I don't think you don't have good comprehension skills. Perhaps you did not read that part where I said "it is so generic as just to be knowledge" such generic expresssion cannot be copyrighted, or if it is subject to copyright it is so de minimus as to be trivial. You cannot copyright a sentence such as "New York is the financial capital of the world." It is trivial expression, believe it or not. (BTW I am a entertainment lawyer, I know what I am talking about, what are your qualifications as a copyright expert?). Alex756

From: "Evan Prodromou" &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Police ledgers are not copyrightable, that is public information. Just like the news is not really copyrightable. That is why you can use pictures of famous people and famous events. Unless their is something particularly creative about the photo there is just a mechanical reproduction. Sort of like the copyright of an old painting. This is one point that copyright paranoia guys harp on, no fair use, we need everything to be "pure". That is not true because there is a lot of trivial stuff that is copied all the time, language itself is copying, you can't copyright the words or even random sets of words, something more is needed, that is creativity. I am not sure that every edit made on Wikipedia is original, fixing typos or grammar problems is not so creative for instance, otherwise most books would have a joint copyright with the editors who get it into shape. It is important to understand the rationale behind copyright law because without such an understanding it is easy to make all kinds of statements about what is copyrighted and copyrightable without understanding the reason we have copyright law, it is not to prevent copying, it is only to prevent others from exploiting an exclusive right that is held by the owner of copyright. If it does not stand in the way of such exclusivity then copying is more than alright, it is useful. Uninformed is a good way of putting it. Not everything is covered by copyright no matter what the lawyers tell you to do (yes they usually say, put a copyright notice on it, you can claim it for some part of it sch as typography, layout, order, etc., but it does not mean that it will stand up in Federal Court, does it?). There are many good textbooks on copyright, Nimmer on Copyright, check out the prison or local law library, they have all the federal cases in them. Or buy a subscription to Lexis-Nexis. Also findlaw.com has a lot of free case law. Most of the federal court web sites have case decisions from the last five years. Wikipedia has a lot of copyright information you can gain access to, there is a list of leading cases (they have not all been briefed so go to it). If you'd like private lessions on copyright law most copyright lawyers are available between $200 and $400 per hour, of course their work is copyright protected as it is not trivial expression, a lot of research goes into rendering such knowledge into a unique form and yet the law itself is often not considered to be copyrighted, or if it is then the enforceablility of such copyright is extremely limited or impossible for if the public could not know and copy the laws without paying a fee any society would be in chaos. Remember copyright is just a concept, it is not something like mathemetics, physics or computer programming, it is a social concept that is in constant evolution. Wikipedia copyright is so diluted anyway that it is practically a grant into the public domain anyway. I doubt that Wikipedia could really sue for individual articles the damages are really minimal and even wholesale copying by "forking" would probably be held to be almost unenforceable because what are the real damages to Wikipedia? It allows free copying anyway with just some moral rights notices that are not that enforceable in US law anyway; really trademark protection is much more important for Wikipedia than blatant copying and reformating of information. Alex (en:user:alex756)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi, Le Sunday 01 February 2004 07:06, Alex R. a écrit : This is something new to me. Do you mean that, say, pictures of the 9/11 attacks are not copyrightable? As well as pictures of the presidents of the US? We have a problem with the pictures of the presidents of France which are "© Présidence de la République. Documentation française". cf. http://www.elysee.fr/instit/fonct3.php Can we put these freely into Wikipedia? Thanks, Yann - -- http://www.non-violence.org/ | Site collaboratif sur la non-violence http://www.forget-me.net/ | Alternatives sur le Net http://fr.wikipedia.org/ | Encyclopédie libre http://www.forget-me.net/pro/ | Formations et services Linux

Yann Forget wrote: As always they are only talking about US copyright law. As far as I know we cannot do any of this in the UK, and I imagine it will be the same in France. Telephone directories are copyrighted in the UK, for example. This is why some of us are very unhappy about "fair use", as it means that we cannot ever host a mirror in the UK, or have a fork. We have no pictures of UK politicians for the same reason. What would be nice would be actual advice as to what _we_ can do. I understand that German wikipedia has banned fair use images. I know that most of what has been suggested is illegal here and that British contributors are cautious because the international nature of the project never seems to be considered. Caroline (User:Secretlondon)

Optim wrote: Does the argument really need answering? That sort of normalising influence is a fact of life that needn't be turned into a value judgement. I think the effect is much stronger on the poor articles where the average person can see the article's weakness and bring it up to his standards. When that same person looks at a great article I find it hard to see him inclined to touch the article. Dumbing it down would be a lot of hard work that could be beyond his capacities. In any event, the standards of the average Wikipedian are higher than the standards in the general population. :-) We begin by excluding everybody who has not yet learned to turn on a computer. The controversial articles should not be viewed as a factor in this. As hot as some of these debates may be, we are still only talking about a small fraction of all the Wikipedia articles. I would venture to guess that Optim's critic may have had some degree of association with a university. In some cases simplification of the writing may be desireable if we are to make things understandable to the general population. That motivation is certainly there in the development of the Simple Wikipedia. By making material that could only be found in university libraries accessible to the general public we are advancing the spread of knowledge. There are also many people out there who for whatever reason may not have had the opportunity or inclination to succeed in a university setting who can be a valuable asset to Wikipedia. Some who can focus very well on a single topic and write credibly may not have the determinationto maintain that focus over the time needed to graduate from university. Around 1900 many public libraries were established to make books and knowledge available to a wider public. Perhaps Jimbo may even some day be revered as the Andrew Carnegie of the internet age. :-) . Ec

AR> Wikipedia copyright is so diluted anyway that it is AR> practically a grant into the public domain anyway. I'm confused as to why it's "diluted". Because so many people have had a hand in making the encyclopedia itself? Or each article? AR> I doubt that Wikipedia could really sue for individual AR> articles the damages are really minimal and even wholesale AR> copying by "forking" would probably be held to be almost AR> unenforceable because what are the real damages to Wikipedia? Not to mention that I don't think Mediawiki holds copyright on much of anything on any of the Wikimedia sites. It would have to be individual authors that sue, AFAICT. Or perhaps Wikipedia could act as "publisher" on behalf on anonymous authors. By the way, do you have to show damages in order to get a court order to stop distributing copyright-violating material? I was under the impression that you didn't. AR> It allows free copying anyway with just some moral rights AR> notices that are not that enforceable in US law anyway; My understand was that copyleft Free Software licenses were pretty darn enforceable. Viz this article by Eben Moglen: http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-09-18-013-20-OP-LL Do you think he's wrong? Or that Free Content is significantly different from Free Software? ~ESP -- Evan Prodromou &lt;evan(a)wikitravel.org&gt; Wikitravel - http://www.wikitravel.org/ The free, complete, up-to-date and reliable world-wide travel guide

Fred Bauder wrote: Another egregious example of indoctrination is the ritual recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in American schools. If something like that is repeated often enough it is bound to influence a person's outlook on history. Ec

Caroline Ford &lt;caroline(a)secretlondon.me.uk&gt; writes: Users located in Germany must not add those images - but, surely, it okay for US citizens to add those pictures to the de WP! -- | ,__o | _-\_<, http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | (*)/'(*)

Am Montag, 2. Februar 2004 18:41 schrieb Karl Eichwalder: No, that's not ok - we will delete them if they come up. Our agreed policy is to have no fair use images, so that *downstream users* may use all of our pictures without having to think about if *their* use is also *fair* use and without checking the copyright status of every single image. That policy ist not so much because of fearing the uploader might interfere with german copyright issues, but to make life easier for the downloader, whereever he or she is located. Uli

Ulrich Fuchs &lt;mail(a)ulrich-fuchs.de&gt; writes: Some of "us" disagree. Of course, you must obey the law - but this does not mean we must make life easy for third party users (who often misuse WP's bandwidth for serving images, though). -- | ,__o | _-\_<, http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | (*)/'(*)

Karl Eichwalder wrote: It seems more sensible to let downstream users accept their own responsibility for what they do based on their own circumstances, notably the laws wherever they happen to be. Ec