[WikiEN-l] Re: votes for deletion

[koyaanis qatsi]

LittleDan writes:
< reminds us of #14, not a place to dump public domain
materials >
>We shouldn't copy content from public domain sources,
>only the information from them.

Are you saying we shouldn't copy in information from
public domain resources, and if so, why are you saying
that?

Copying in public information has been very useful in
building up the country articles--all of them are
based on CIA information, with many of them
supplemented with information from the State
Department.  There is no harm in that.  Similarly,
some but not all of the biographical entries come from
public domain resources.

The problem with public domain sources is not that
they are public domain, but that copyright has far
extended any sort of reasonable limit and has turned
into a system for controlling culture in perpetuity. 
In less ideological terms, what that means is that
nearly everything post 1920s is *not* in the public
domain, so the information you can glean from public
domain resources typically predates that and so is
often anachronistic to the point of being useless. 
This was the case with the information on [[Algeria]]
from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, which took me
several hours to verify, and even then I got no more
than a few paragraphs from it.  Similarly, this was
the problem with the various instructions someone was
uploading about e.g. how to swim, as well as the
recipes from the 1800s and early 1900s, referring to
ingredients, methods, and measurements that often had
not been in use for decades.  Often the material in
old biographical entries is laden with various
cultural assumptions which are incorrect or downright
embarassing.

Anyway, that is the background behind #14.  It's not
an absolute--or at least it shouldn't be--it's a
warning: know what you're in for, and be prepared to
do a lot of work.

kq

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