[Foundation-l] Building The Great Monument of Bureaucracy

[Judson Dunn]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 5:05 AM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Very simply. If an organisation is going to make a project it will get
> their own space on "Staging Area" and will upload their stuff there
> without any legal problems. Then, one or more editors must examine
> this stuff adding to it meta-data and resolve all legal problems
> before sending it to Commons or any other WIkimedia project. The
> formal agreements can be stored on "Staging Area" and be made visible
> for OTRS volunteers. So instead of sending houndres of E-mails from
> all contributors of the project there will be only one pointing to the
> meta-data stored on Staging Area. Anyway, if you organize a mass
> contributors project you must be sure that all contributors were
> informed how free licences work, that their contribiutions can be used
> for commercial purposes, that anyone can copy and modify it.

That might make the process more visible, and get it off an email only
system. Many people, I think, will still want to use email though,
since it's the only thing they are familiar with. Many of the people
that write to permissions are not very tech savvy.

And in defense of the bureaucratic morons, you might be surprised the
number of super positive generous people that want their work on
Wikipedia that are completely unwilling to allow 3rd parties to use
their work. I don't personally make people say "The Great Sentence of
Our Holy Secrets" but I would like some indication that they are ok
with other people using their work commercially. Many people simply
aren't, and it hasn't crossed their minds that when they give
something to Wikipedia that is what they're signing up for. I think we
owe it to those people to make sure they understand.

But yes, I'm not arguing that the system is good, but there is
legitimately a lot of education that needs to happen before someone
completely unfamiliar with free content licenses their work cc-by-sa.
It's a tough problem. And, honestly, does copying and pasting the
"Great Sentence" actually make people feel comfortable that the person
understands what's happening? It probably shouldn't.

Judson
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cohesion