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

[George Herbert]

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 6:23 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu> wrote:
> On Saturday 02 August 2008 05:41:35 David Goodman wrote:
>> But fewer future works will build of Wikipedia  if they cant use it
>> how they want. I find it interesting that the people here are
>> concerned about financial rathe than intellectual credit.
>
> Both things you say are flat out wrong. First, it is by no means certain that
> fewer future works will build on Wikipedia if it continues with a copyleft
> license; immediately perhaps, but you are forgetting that people will be able
> to build upon derivatives of derivatives, which would otherwise not be the
> case.


This line of argument is more interesting in theory than in practice.

True - if we -BY license something and it gets derived / transformed
into a non-free license form, we can't directly build on that.

But we can look at that, and rewrite our stuff with theirs in mind.

Not being able to simply scoop up and reuse their words is, for
nonfiction writing, not much of an obstacle.  If they add facts,
sources, etc., those things are all openly available *anyways*.  If
they polish prose, we may not be able to import it wholesale, but at
the least we can take it as another view on how to improve the
existing WP text.


> Second, I don't think that anyone here has mentioned anything about
> financial credit; people are concerned about continuing availability of work,
> which is a completely different matter.

Someone explicitly mentioned not wanting a third party to benefit
financially from their Wikipedia work earlier in thread.

You and many others (myself included) may not care about this, but it
is a concern that is expressed by a consistent fraction of the
contributors who comment on such things.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com