[WikiEN-l] African maps

[gwern branwen]

On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Absolutely, there's lots of reasons, but the reasons should be there on
> an item by item basis.  Do we need to indiscriminately host their entire
> corpus of maps when we only have use for a few?  Even the argument that
> something might be taken down needs to be on a case by case basis, and
> not base it on unfounded speculation.  There are some sites, not major
> universities, where this would be a worry.  A site where there has been
> no new activity in the last couple of years might be a cause for concern.

Licenses and technical details can change at any time. We aren't
really hurting for disk space, and why shouldn't Commons host all
sorts of Free media suitable for reference works like Wikipedia, even
if they aren't being used at that exact moment? Hosting them means
further exposure and archival - Wikipedians may see the maps who would
never have visited the university map, backups of Commons will also
entail backups of their content (and dumps of Commons are much more
common than dumps of that site), etc. And it's not like it's all that
difference - a wget or curl, and then one of the mass upload tools, or
something like pywikipedia's imageharvest.py.

Further, how does our mirroring their content *hurt* them? They are
not a commercial enterprise; ostensibly they are devoted to the
development and spreading of knowledge and information. Leaving out
entirely the issue of them being a university (even though they are
private, they are still subsidized through tax breaks and funding and
that sort of thing) and thus the American tax-payers on this list
having a right to the material, our mirroring would seem to only
further their mission.

> We all love to hate M*******t, partly because it dominates its
> industry.  We need to be conscious of not becoming resentfully referred
> to as W*******a because of our dominance.  I think that it's important
> to view ourselves as a part of a community of websites developing free
> access to information.  That requires maintaining the respect of other
> members of that community, and you don't do that by raiding their
> efforts.  The survival of a vision depends on sharing that vision, and
> that cannot happen if our allied co-visionaries are  put in a position
> where they need to defend their efforts from the superpower on the block.

People hate Microsoft for many reasons, but mostly because of what it
did to achieve that dominance and what it does (or doesn't do) with
all the money and power that position entails. They hate the crappy
software, the lack of security and usability, the high fees, the
overreaching DRM and legalities, the illegal business practices, the
standards it destroys and monetizes for its own gain, the lack of
innovation, and so on and so forth. I don't think the actual dominance
itself is the issue. It makes all the reasons I listed much more
pressing than the equivalent criticisms which could be leveled
against, say, Apple, but it is not itself the reason. Wikimedia
foundation projects dominating could be bad if we *abuse* it. But if
Wikimedia foundation projects are dominant because the infrastructure
is stable and capable of achieving what is asked of it, if they are
dominant because they have so much content already, if there is a good
community already there, if various network effects reward
contributing to foundation projects, etc. then why is it a bad thing?

> Ethical considerations rest upon forseeing the consequences of one's own
> actions.  Ethics are not governed by rules and laws, nor are they
> imposed through fear of arbitrary punishment.  Ethics involves a
> willingness to be at a disadvantage when it is the right thing to do.
>
> Ec

--Gwern