[Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2011/6/17 Strainu <strainu10 at gmail.com>:
> I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in
> other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the
> wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot
> consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA
> license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control
> offered by copyright laws.

It's not so much about CC-BY-SA as it is about the fact that it's a
wiki, where content is constantly changed by different people. This
breaks the usual idea of authorship and makes quite a lot of people
terribly uncomfortable and sometimes even violent. It's unpleasant,
but i understand how their feel and i want to find a way to work with
them.

But since you mention licensing, one possible solution to this problem
that i though of is to suggest such people write their content on some
other website where others can't change their text, but to release it
as CC-BY-SA, so Wikipedia would be able to use. That could be a good
use case for a project like Knol, which was advertised as "Wikipedia
killer" once, but didn't grow much. Used wisely, these Wikipedia and
Knol could actually help each other grow. This would cause forking, of
course, but forking isn't really bad - a forked freely-licensed
article is better than no freely-licensed article.

This solution is far from perfect, of course, because many people want
Their articles on The Wikipedia, not on some other non-notable
website...