On 11/28/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

On 27/11/05, Mike Finucane mike_finucane@yahoo.com wrote:

...

I'm going to have to re-evaluate contributing to wikipedia if its based on providing source material for commercial companies.

Feel free to explain WHY you have this policy; but I have to say your explanation above wasnt very tactful or conducive to goodwill on my part.

Basic problem: Wikipedia has a goal of producing an encylopedia. Not an encyclopedia limited only to people with Internet access - though internet access is certainly booming - but an encyclopedia accessible through other means. The long-term goal of this is, of course, the mythical Printed Version - it's still in the air as to whether this will ever be successful, but we do try and keep it in mind.

But there's other options. In Germany, for example, there was a very successful DVD distribution of the German-language wikipedia; it was reformatted, put on DVD, and sold for ten euros(?). A large swathe of this went back to the Foundation, a small quantity went to production costs, and the residue went to the company that produced and distributed them. Given the remarkable sales, I assume they made a profit - asking on wikipedia-l would probably get some nice German to explain this in better detail.

If the restriction is that the use be "non-commercial", then it doesn't matter whether or not they made a profit anyway. Selling DVDs qualifies as commercial regardless of whether or not you make a profit, and under my and probably most interpretations, it qualifies as commercial even if done by a non-profit organization.

This was very popular, and no doubt a good thing for the project - but it was a commercial venture, and had it contained non-commercial material it wouldn't have been able to go ahead, because the company was distributing it at more than cost. Any form of large-scale distribution is likely to fall afoul of non-commercial clauses, at some point, or at least to clash with them to such an extent that it becomes impractical to do the distribution at anything but a loss.

I wonder how much of the success of the German DVD compared to the lack (AFAIK) of one for the English Wikipedia has to do with the lack of fair use images in the German Wikipedia. I'm sure it's not the only problem, the English Wikipedia is a lot larger and wouldn't even fit on a DVD without some serious trimming anyway.

Picking a random role, we'd love to provide, oh, a ten-dollar encyclopedia to Indian schools. But if the choice is providing a fifteen-dollar one with someone making a profit, or not being able to afford to provide a ten-dollar one at cost, then fifteen starts to sound pretty good.

Yes, this can be avoided by cleaning out with-permission and limited-use images, but this itself provides another burden - the labour to filter images. If we only accept images which are known to be redistributable, then this presages that problem. We already do this with text, and the reason for the strong wording is because we recently tightened the standards on images.

(Personally, I feel we are more insistent on only-free-images than we absolutely need to be, but...)

Probably more importantly than the trouble of cleaning out certain images is the fact that we're much less likely to find or create free images if we already have semi-free ones.

I hope that explains matters.

It explains why en.Wikipedia doesn't allow non-commercial use images. And it does so a lot better than some of the other explanations (images *don't* have to be GFDL or even GFDL-compatible as some others stated). But it doesn't explain why en.Wikipedia doesn't allow images which are free for educational use (such as in an encyclopedia). Personally I think this restriction should be relaxed and the one on non-commercial images tightened. The goal of Wikipedia is to create an encyclopedia, not provide images for people to use in commercials or other non-encyclopedia productions.

--

• Andrew Gray

andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk

Anthony