[Foundation-l] Commons and Portuguese Wikipedia

[Luiz Augusto]

Hi

On 11/15/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 11/15/06, Luiz Augusto <lugusto at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > The Portuguese Wikipedia has disabled new uploads because the civil war
> > started (and maintaned) by some users up today don't have produced a new
> > vote to review the copyright policy to allow ou permanently disallow
> fair
> > use images,
> [snip]
>
> When we have problems with contributors who are unable to understand
> important aspects of our agenda like Free Content we must solve that
> problem through more communication.
>
> So it is with much sadness that I view your decision to avoid unfree
> content by forcing the use of commons. Communication is most effective
> when it comes from someone close, from someone trusted, or from
> someone respected. Communication is best understood when it comes from
> someone who speaks your language.


Ok, I mentioned the civil war and now I need to explain it. In the past, a
troll has discovered that Portuguese Wikipedia up to 2004 is a very smallest
community and have started to atack all past decisions, including the image
policy. Imagine a troll in a very very controversial subject... Imagine some
users needing to change a policy and having a troll of your spokesperson...
Civil war has started, some users has left from the Portuguese Wikipedia,
and newbies that not undertand what is Free Culture instead to read the
documentation reads the troll pages about the """fair use""".

If you were unable to educate some members of your own community about
> free content, then I fear commons will have no hope of educating these
> people because commons is no better at speaking your langauge, no
> better known to your users, and probably no better respected.


Now the problem is another. The problem today is newbies that don't read
documentation, like in all wikis, including the native speakers of English
that don't read the documentation about image policy and don't undertand
what is really free and what isn't free. The civil war is now dormant,
specially after the upload disable. Commons have a biggest structure to host
images and the basic documentation is translated or going to be translated.
But the users don't RTFM

Such changes will only shuffle around and not solve the problems. See:
> http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIMBY
>
>
Yeah, but Wikipedia (neither Commons) don't have anything related to newbies
that don't understand the copyright property and don't RTFM. And the biggest
problem is upload of images with no source and no license tag (and Commons
have a bot to discover images with no tag). And this isn't exclusively
related to Portuguese, Spanish or any another language.

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