[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

[David Goodman]

I know the following is not the current situation, but:

The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia
content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be
necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it
was taken.

Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of
our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word
except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom
with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take
intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is
material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and
I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and
republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim
what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it.
People do this with PD US government material routinely.)

I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really
cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How
could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the
contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of
others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it
open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes
completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the
attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I
write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY,
but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for
reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not
when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution
will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they
wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they
started them or wrote some of what remains in the content.  You get no
reputation from writing scattered sentences.

Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they
carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled,
because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer
contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he
contributed, though, is still there.

There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to
the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the
world to the merits of "libre" publishing.  But maintaining it in
Wikipedia is  pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and
the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you
please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the
zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the
need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary
people mean "free".  They're using the technicalities of their
licenses to restrict content if other  people want to use differently
from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop
non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not
apply to us.

NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what
we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it.  I'm not one, but I
think  the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest
possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they
contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text
rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what
i expect, i hereby offer to do it.

On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is
>> giving such limited license choices.  I don't know for sure, of
>> course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one
>> possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike
>> licenses would have on embedded ads.
>
> Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see
> a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging
> license in addition to whatever you give the public.
>
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-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG