[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project boring to death

[Anthony]

On 7/29/06, Sherool <jamydlan at online.no> wrote:
> Our current policy is that we want our content to be (completely) free
> (wich include the ability to make derivative works) *especialy* in
> comunity space (since all user contributions are supposed to be free
> licensed). Granted this is more for "philosophical" reasons (we are a free
> content project and all that) than practical legal ones, but it *is* the
> current policy, in fact is is one of the 5 pillars of the project wich
> states "(...)Do not submit copyright infringements **or works licensed in
> a way incompatible with the GFDL**." (emphasis mine), and just for the
> record ND licenses are not compatable with the GFDL.
>
> If you are saying we should change the policy and allow use of unfree (or
> at least "semi free") contnet in "community space" because it is seperate
>  from our content, then that is one thing, I disagree, but it is a somewhat
> valid argument.

Well, yeah, that is what I'm saying.  But I should point out that this
*was* the policy up until about a year ago.  The new policy in my
opinion doesn't make any sense.  This particular example is evidence
of that.

Yes, we'd like everything to be free (how "completely" varies from
person to person, but putting a restriction on most derivative works
is certainly not acceptable).  You say especially in project space.  I
say especially in article space.  But either way, a wish for
everything to be complete free does not equal a mandate that
everything must be completely free.

As for whether or not ND licenses are "compatible" with the GFDL, it
seems to me that they're just as compatible as CC-BY-SA licenses.
You're not suggesting that these must be removed from Wikipedia, are
you?

I'd also like to point out something you said.  Maybe you meant it in
this way, and maybe you didn't.  You said "all user contributions are
supposed to be free licensed".  I take that to mean that contributions
for which the Wikipedian owns the copyright must be free licensed.  If
that were the situation, if we were talking about a case where a
Wikipedian owned the license to the image, then I think we'd be
talking about something different.

> You might be interested in trying to breathe som life back
> info
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_for_community_images>.

No, not at all.  Wikipedia politics is not a game I'm good at playing.

> However what I'm trying to say is that I'm uncomfortable with the idea of
> a handfull of users just desciding that in this one case we will simply
> ignore a core policy of the project because it doesn't allow them to do
> what they want to.
>
And I completely agree with this part of your argument.  There
shouldn't be a special exception made just for this case.  If the vast
majority of people agree that Wikipedia should include this image in
the Wikipedia namespace, then we should be asking ourselves why, and
adapting the policy to fit this situation.

And while we're at it, we should either remove [[Image:Wikimedia.png]]
from the User namespace or examine why policy allows that one too.
Allowing that one in the User namespace is just plain old hypocrisy.

Anthony