I'm forwarding my message to the wikitech list because I think this might be of more interest to you people than wikipedians at large.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Becker mbecker@jumpingjackweb.com Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:43:09 -0400 Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] defining Free Encyclopedia To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org
Personally, the *free*ness of wikipedia concerns me a lot too. This was my first concern when I first submitted the image to vfd. I personally had NO political or censorship concerns. That is pretty obvious if you check out the history of the Clitoris article. In any case, I'm also VERY concerned about the effects of using copyrighted material in the wikipedia will have on it's freeness. As I see it now though, as long as there is a hard line drawn between copyrighted and GPL material, it should be easy enough to remove. If we don't facilitate the easy removal of this content, the wikipedia is no longer free, and we have failed in our goals IMHO. At the moment, the lines drawn between free and non-free content in the wikipedia are very thin. This is a line drawn by the users, and we are essentially trusting people who upload these non-free images/content to make sure it is easy to distinguish their added content as non-free. I'm not very comfortable with this. IMNSHO, it wo uld be better if we had some sort of hard line drawn on the software side of things between free and non-free content so that it can easily be removed in the future.
On Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:38:12 -0400, Anthony DiPierro anthonydipierro@hotmail.com wrote:
Well, the email has been sent already, so why don't we see what they reply with? I hardly see how any kind of permission (or refusal) from AP could [be] bad for us: It clarifies our options, but we don't /have/ to avail of them if we don't want.
First of all, refusal wouldn't clarify our options. If the image is being used in a way which is fair use, then it's fair use regardless of whether or not AP has refused to allow us to use it. Secondly, clarifying our options doesn't resolve the dispute. Having options is exactly the reason we have the dispute. If we didn't have any options, we wouldn't have a dispute.
Besides, the root of the problem _as I perceive it_ is that this is a proxy political dispute:
The very people pushing hardest against that picture's use and for its removal on copyright grounds made edits that would seem to hint at a political affiliation which might make them feel uncomfortable about this picture. (That's not a judgment, just an observation.)
That's certainly not the *root* of the problem. It may be why the problem came to light in this particular instance, but the root of the problem has nothing to do with these details. The root of the problem is that we haven't decided what it means to be a *free* encyclopedia. This needs to be resolved in a way which provides objective criteria for inclusion. We've started along on that path, but we've still got a long way to go.
Incidently, this is somewhat analogous to the problem of deciding what it means to be a free *encyclopedia*. We're farther along with that definition, and have already come up with somewhat objective criteria at [[Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not]]. But we still resort to [[Wikipedia:Votes for deletion]], still have ongoing inclusion disputes, and people still abuse the abiguities for political purposes.
My motivation was to settle the copyright situation, yay or nay, so people can THEN deal with it.
If we first wanted to wait till we had agreement, we'd wait till kingdom come.
I don't think that's at all the case. I'm probably one of the biggest objectors to having non-free images on Wikipedia, and I've come a long way toward accepting some non-GFDL images as being "free enough". I actually think the majority of the problem is a lack of understanding rather than diametrically opposed viewpoints.
I think we can come to an agreement on what it means to be a *free* *encyclopedia*. It would probably speed things up to organize the effort, and that's why I proposed as part of my platform when I ran for the Wikimedia board to start a committee with the task of defining those terms by community consensus (i.e. what the term means to us). I think a definition of the term "Free Encyclopedia", similar in concept and spirit to the GNU Project's definition of Free Software (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html), formed by the community as a whole and ratified by the board, would *be* an agreement, and I think it could be reached. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
Thanks and regards, Jens Ropers
Anthony _______________________________________________