On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@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