On 12/25/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)web.de> wrote: That is likely not enough, because you couldn't discover the principal authors that way... a great many republication worthy articles are almost entirely written by one or two people. But more importantly, a mere list of names would not appear to be enough to satisify the GFDL's requirement to 'Preserve the section Entitled "History"'. It would be preferable to only include templates which are used in the main namespace, although that would further complicate the dumping process.

On 12/25/05, GerardM <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Perhaps it will, but the foundation will not be able steal credit from the actual authors of the works in Wikipedia for itself, at least not without a legal fight. Most quality works in Wikipedia are the work of a small number of authors per work, not these massively collaborative efforts as has been misrepresented to the free software foundation. As such it would be ill advised to suggest to people that they do not need to provide attribution, so if thats what you were implying with you message I suggest you amend your words. Wikipedia will not fall under CC wiki like terms so long as I and others who care about the moral rights of authors have the financial means to prevent it.

On 12/25/05, The Hooded Man <hoodedman(a)shadowedcorner.com> wrote: There is no conspiracy theory needed. You ask "would the foundation do this", but we need to first be clear on what 'this' means. If 'this' means treating our authors in any way which is unethical today, I stand firmly that the answer is clearly no. In the future, I can not answer because my crystal ball is not that powerful. If 'this' means to work to cause changes to be made to future versions of the licenses which temporarily increase the foundations ease at the expense at removing the protection of the authors from unethical actions in the future, I must answer a resounding yes because it is demonstrably true. The Wikimedia foundation has been quietly advocating to the Creative Commons and the Free Software foundations alterations to further versions of the appropriate licenses which will allow the operators of websites such as Wikipedia the authority to permit redistribution of content submitted to their website with attribution to the site rather than the author of the content. In effect, the *single* remaining tangible return an author of freely licensed content receives (their authorship credit) will be removed and granted to the priesthood of intellectual property barons who have apparently earned the right to take credit for the blood and sweat of a world of people because of their great feat of operating a website. For the latest in the implementation of this grand vision, take a look at the terms of the CC-Wiki license, or the mysteriously vague attribution terms so cowardly sneaked into CC-BY-SA v2.0. These changes to cc-by-sa could have been implemented as another CC license flag 'CA' (community attribution) but instead it was decided to include the changes into the root license with no mention in the layman version, presumably because such a change would fail to change the license of existing works against the consent of the authors and would probably too much attention to this difficult issue. Although this has not been widely noticed, I certainly am not the only one... For example see the interesting distribution terms on enwiki User:Jamesday. The argument used to advance this change is that, somehow, by being submitted to a collaborative authorship site a document no longer has authors but is somehow authored by the 'community'. In some cases a compelling argument can indeed be made that there was no effective single person author of the work, but even in these cases (which I contend are rare) it takes a fantastic leap of faith to make the claim that some organization (non-profit or otherwise) is the sole official legal voice of the above mentioned ephemeral 'community' of authors simple because they operate a website which is used by that community. But, indeed, that is exactly what is being claimed and what is being swallowed because it's a lot easier to pretend that a website operator represents the community because the reality of the matter (that the community is a shifting cloud of unclear membership and representation) is useless for solving the real challenges presented by the requirement of preserving something as simple as authorship credit in the world of paper. Basically we're reaching a point where silly details like the moral obligation to credit the authors of a work are hindering the grand vision of the knowledge of the world made available to all at the lowest cost possible. This is a hard problem, so rather than dealing with it head on, the details are being swept under the rug. Licenses will and have been retroactively changed to reflect this prioritization of the quick solution over ethical obligations. Normally I would not worry about this, because such changes which defy the character of the licenses agreed to by the creators of content would never stand... but the more I consider the issue the more I realize how many differing forces will support such changes for both laudable (in the case of the foundation) and selfish reasons, and it leaves me feeling unsure and angry. I fear that we, the community of authors and spokesmen who support the propagation of knowledge freely to the world, have become so impatient with the slowness of achieving our goals that we have begun to take steps to extinguish the protective flame of decentralization which immunizes our work from the privatization, exploitation, and commercial imprisonment by greedy self interests, simply because the resulting legal obligations of that decentralized existence have become a temporary hindrance to our important goals. Such a move to promote the notion that the operator of a telecommunication service (isn't that what the foundation claims to be when it invokes the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA as a reassurance that our negligent handling of copyright matters will go unpunished) is granted a special position of unique control over the creative works by the users of that service will not only be supported by the operators of Wiki's who are currently so inconvenienced, but it will also be strongly supported by the newly re-merged telecommunications giants so eager to exercise their believed right to extract maximum profit from every bit transferred across their glass. The words "theft" and "steal" constantly create confusion when applied to information, it is unfortunate that we use them. You are quite correct that no one can take away what we already have, but it is quite possible that through changes in license that powerful interests will be able to claim special rights over the works of others because of their ownership of telecommunications infrastructure at least that is the notion embodied by the proposed license changes. So that while you will be free to use the content you helped create, another group, by virtue of their operation of a telecommunications service, will be far more free. You can not claim that you are free so long as there is another group which has more freedom with the work you created. Welcome to the new serfdom. Today we love and trust our telecommunications service providing masters, but what changes does the future bring?

Gerard Meijssen wrote: It's more accurate to say that he moved himself from [[Category:Naïve]] Getting down on your knees and humming this kind of mantra accomplishes fuck-all. A legal right with no mechanism for enforcement is a paper tiger. And who is responsible for maintaining an unbroken chain of attributions? What's the rush about having "ease of distribution"? Yes, we would like to have the material universally available; that's an undisputed goal. At the same time I don't believe in charging headlong into conflicted territory just to make the life of a handful of people easier. The implications of the GFDL are completely untested in the courts, and grafting on various CC provisions only serves to muddy the waters. Ideally we should be working toward our own WMF license with a slow and deliberate consideration of every clause, but that should done in a way that would make the situation even worse. I read the word "silly" in an ironic sense. The rest of your comment seems like a convenient excuse for doing nothing. The "reason" in the arguments can probably be paraphrased by, "Have faith, and the Lord will provide." Ec

The Hooded Man wrote: That's a strange question. Probably the current Board would not, but one must always be open to the possibility that it could happen with some future Board. Yhr huge market value would be very tempting. A person that is so minded can afford the patience to take whatever number of years would be needed to put himself in the position to be able to do this. Believing that it could never happen is one way od insuring that it does happen. The legal fight would be the least of their worries. Who would defend the rights of the individual authors? On one side you have an individual with clear vested interests, a chance to make big money, and prospects attractive enough to hire legal help on a contingency basis. On the other side is a large collective assortment of loosely connected authors who do not lose any money by letting go of rights that would be very expensive to defend. I agree that any single work may be the product of a small number of authors, but someone who is after bigger game can easily abandon specific articles without any effect on his bottom line. The big copyright fight of the future is unlikely to be over Wikipedia's infringement of the copyright of others; we have a history of building and continually improving mechanisms for dealing with that. The big fight will be when someone else takes the GFDL material and unrepentedly tries to claim copyright for himself. Who will be there to defend the rights of our individual authors? What individual will be able to defend his rights in what could be a very complex lawsuit? In the absence of an organization (perhaps the Foundation) which can be named a collective agent for all our authors (or at least most of them) I don't see how such a defense can happen. This naïvely misses the point. It's true enough, but there is a difference between a licence and putting material into the public domain. The underlying principle and condition of the licence is that there will be a chain of people who will successively apply this licence. The person who breaks that chain is the one who violates the GFDL. What CAN anybody do about it? Conspiracy theories have nothing to do with this. Ec

On 12/25/05, Magnus Manske <magnus.manske(a)web.de> wrote: The already have that in the full dumps, granted it includes other data as well but if you're going to publish something it's hardly a showstopper to download the full dump and extract the info you need from that.