[Foundation-l] Swedish Wikipedians removes Wikimedia logos

[Mike Godwin]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 4:55 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The Swedish Wikipedia has drawn a line in the sand that all content in
> article space should meet the definition of "free
> content".[http://freedomdefined.org/]


I agree that they've been drawing a line in the sand, all right.


>  The reason for using this
> criteria is so that there is not a need to consult a different license
> for each logo in order to determine what uses are acceptable.
>

The issue, though, is that there's no specific problem at all associated
with the appearances of the Wikimedia copyrighted and trademarked logos in
the contexts in which they are used.  *In other words, all this attention
has been focused on a problem that has never occurred with regard to the
images in question.*

I keep pointing out, of course, that there's lots of material in Swedish
Wikipedia that's not freely licensed -- for example, the names of Living
Persons or the true names of contributors who choose to share them.

What seems to me to be happening here is a kind of nervous insistence on a
very simplistic kind of ideological consistency, which, if it were followed
further along this extreme, would threaten to make Wikipedia unusable.
Consider for example the famous quotation mentioned here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reliance .


The availability of a WMF license for their logos is useful for some
> purposes, however the Wikimedia logos do not meet the criteria of free
> content.


And therefore if the Wikimedia logos are used with permission on
Wikimedia-hosted projects, the earth will crack open, and dogs and cats will
start living together openly.


>  If Wp.Sv doesn't want to accept non-free licenses in article
> space, then it is understandable that the WMF logos need to go as
> well.
>

This is perhaps too broad a use of the word "understandable" than I am used
to.


--Mike