[Foundation-l] Partnership with Mandrakesoft

[Erik Moeller]

Yann-
> Hi,

> Mandrakesoft, the company which created and sells the Linux distribution, is
> interested to distribute a DVD with an English and French version of
> Wikipedia. This DVD will be sold in their web site and included with the
> next distribution, due in next April.

As a responsible organization, we should make Mandrakesoft aware of the  
fact that no systematic vetting of all articles for copyright violations  
has taken place yet (at least on en:). If they want to take the  
responsibility for some guy inserting chapters from a book, or the text of  
a paper, or a magazine article, into Wikipedia, then that's OK, but this  
*is* a substantial risk, because changing the text on thousands of  
distributed DVDs is obviously a lot harder than taking down some bad  
revisions from our site.

If Mandrakesoft ends up getting into trouble for this, I would like us to  
be able to publicly say "Shit happens, but we told you so" when this hits  
Slashdot or the New York Times.

Unfortunately it's a little too easy - and therefore tempting - to create  
physical media distributions. We *really* need a working peer review  
mechanism in place before we go into that business. Besides fact-checking,  
we need a process where there are people who check the text against  
subscriber-only electronic archives, offline sources etc. for copyright  
violations, for example. This should be less difficult than it sounds if  
an expert in the field is checking the article anyway - those people  
usually have easy access to material in their field.

Even basic Google searches are often not done. In terms of automated  
scanning, we should at least cover Google, groups.google and the  
Amazon.com "search inside the book" feature.

Am I the only one who is worried about this?

Regards,

Erik