[Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy

[Milos Rancic]

A year or so ago I realized that it is better to make an auxiliary
site to Wikipedia [in Serbian] than to spend a lot of time in
explaining to students that everyone has to send to me the sentence "I
agree that all of my work is realized under ...". It may be funny for
the first couple of times, it may be assumed as the part of the job
during the next couple of times, but spending ~1 hour per week in
explaining what someone should write inside of an email for
contribution of three articles -- is too much.

But, it was a kind of problems which couldn't be avoided. Our present
system of getting permissions is not able to handle 100 persons at one
time. And we should think how to solve it.

But, during the couple of previous days I've got one more contribution
to our Monument. This kind of contributions make me to think that
Wikipedia in English (not just en.wp for sure) is becoming -- slowly
but surely -- the main problem in spreading free knowledge. So, here
is the development:

* In 2005 I've asked one professor for permissions for his material.
In those times OTRS didn't exist, so I've left it on Wikipedia [1].

* Four years later one pedantic administrator of en.wp noticed that
that professor gave permissions under GFDL, not under CC-BY-SA. Even a
moron would be able to understand that GFDL was just a word -- which
doesn't mean anything to that professor -- inside of the clear
explanation of the copyleft principle.

* So, I've asked the professor again. I've explained that I need his
approval for using material under CC-BY-SA and he agreed. Of course,
I've just repeated the same, copyleft conditions and gave the link to
the CC-BY-SA human readable code. And I forwarded it to
permissions-en.

* Then I've got one more pedantically bureaucratic answer: Professor
didn't repeat The Great Sentence of Our Holy Secrets (he just said
"Dear Milos, You have my permission for usage of materials from my
websites, also including...") and he said that he is giving
permissions "to the extent that he is authorized to give us such
permission for usage", which is not, from the bureaucratic point of
view (BPOV), clear enough. It is suggested: "Any material that he is
not authorized to give us permission to use must be clearly noted."
Even, again, a moron would be able to understand what has been created
by professor at his site and what is not. For example, if he used some
photo and he is describing that photo as an art and mentions the
author of the photo -- logically, this photo is not his. If he quoted
some author and describes that quote -- logically, this quote is not
his. And so on. The other problem which such bureaucracy is opening is
the fact that that suggestion means without any doubt that I would
need a week or more of work to mark everything on professor's five
sites.

* So, my only response to such moronic bureaucracy is: Fuck you! Of
course, it is not about particular Wikimedia volunteers, it is about
the whole system which transforms good persons into bureaucratic
morons.

And why it is so? Because we have hundreds or thousands of cases
before courts because not so pedantically defined sentences? Because
it is reasonable to suppose that a professor who already gave to us
permissions to get materials from his site four years ago will sue us
because not so well worded agreement for giving materials under
CC-BY-SA? Fuck you, again!

I mentioned just two examples, but there are at least a couple of more
similar from my experience.

As this kind of bureaucracy is so deeply inside of Wikimedia and
especially at Wikipedia and especially at Wikipedia in English -- the
only solution which I am able to see is to create a number of
auxiliary sites which would take care about permissions instead of
Wikimedia. However, this is a very clear path of making Wikipedia and
Wikimedia less relevant. After five years of such tendencies some
standards will be created. After another five Wikipedia won't be
necessary anymore.

I would like to say that the option is to work against such
bureaucracy. However, I am not so optimistic in relation to the large
projects which are already deeply bureaucratic. Even a number of
smaller projects suffer from bureaucracy because of strong influence
of the large projects.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Millosh/Permissions_from_Robert_Elsie