[Foundation-l] Laugh or cry, just don't quote me.

[Robert Rohde]

In writing the Foundation's resolution on licensing policy and enwiki's
non-free content criteria (i.e. it's "exemption doctrine policy"), there
appears to be a little problem.  Both were designed around handling images,
but written in a way that could be (mis?)understood as also applying to
non-free text (i.e. quotes).

We are assuming that it was not the Foundation's intention to require that
all quotes be labeled in a "machine-readable format so that it can be easily
identified by users of the site as well as re-users", or to generically
stomp out the practice of quoting others whenever possible.

For the moment, I am just looking to confirm our assumption that the
Foundation isn't planning to persecute the simple act of quoting others.  At
some point, it might be nice to also clarify the licensing policy language.

In the mean time, enwiki needs to work on resolving the ambiguities in our
non-free content policies.  (Since, for example, we don't want prohibit
people from using quotes in discussions appearing on talk pages.)  Obviously
there need to be some limits (i.e. don't quote entire book chapters), but
defining acceptable and unacceptable uses of third party text should allow
for a different set of considerations than currently applied to images.

If this all sounds dumb, I'm rather inclined to agree, but there is a
legitimate complaint that our restrictions on "non-free content" ought to be
able to handle (or contain appropriate exemptions for) the normal ways that
we use other people's text in writing our articles.

-Robert Rohde

PS. The enwiki discussion is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#Non-free_text