[WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles

[user_Jamesday]

At my urging in IRC chat, this and the redirects from it are listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Possible_copyright_infringements#March_2 .

A meaningful selection of a subset is copyrightable and the selection of articles to include in an encyclpedia is such a meaningful selection.

The company has a major financial incentive to take us to court bcause we are competitors. Our normal transformative use fair use argument doesn't exist because they are an encyclopedia and so are we, so fair use is far, far tougher to argue. We also lose our unwritten fifth fair use factor "are they good people?" positive result in this case.

They would take us to court and this is free ammunition forthem to use to do it. Whether they do it before a print edition or after, to do the greatest possible harm by requiring all copies to be recalled or destroyed, is not knowable by us.

We must not use the selection of articles made by another encyclopedia as a checklist for articles we want. If individual Wikipedians do so, that's their problem but we must not conspire with them to facilitate it.

It's not a problem to do things like noting that it's common for encyclopedias to use "lastname, firstname" form for names and add redirects of that sort for every individual we have in the Wikipedia. It's not a problem to note that encyclopedias often use the names of popes not preceded by the word pope and create redirects for that. But it is a problem if a large subset is selected and systematically worked on in this way. It's also a very big giveaway if they see lots of referrers from a Wikipedia page to their site.

It was a good and helpful thought Timwi, but it does lots of potential harm and shouldn't be done in this way. If you instead make a bot to create lastname, firstname redirects, that would be useful and not a problem.

-----Original Message-----
From: Timwi 
To: wikien-l at wikipedia.org
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 18:01:07 +0000
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Columbia encyclopedia article titles


It is now official! :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Columbia_Encyclopedia_article_titles

If you have a minute of spare time, please take a peek at some of the 
links. If Wikipedia articles exist on some of the topics, create 
redirects to them and remove them from the list.

If you are certain that a particular topic does not have a corresponding 
Wikipedia article, it would probably make sense to mark them somehow - 
perhaps move them to the bottom of the page into an extra section.

Thanks!
Timwi

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