[WikiEN-l] Fwd: What can you do under a GDFL licence

[Keith Old]

Folks,

This is a message that I originally meant to send to English Wikipedia list
but stupidly managed to send to the unblock list.

Regards


Keith Old

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Keith Old <keithold at gmail.com>
Date: Mar 23, 2007 3:38 PM
Subject: What can you do under a GDFL licence
To: "unblock-en-l at wikipedia.org" <unblock-en-l at wikipedia.org>

Folks,

I received a Google blog alert from Wikipedia which alerted me to this blog
entry by someone who wants to use data in a different way.

http://tinfinger.blogspot.com/2007/03/citizendium-wikipedia-and-tinfinger.html

It states:

"I've set up a CompInt tab in my NetVibes to track blogs of those founders
who I see as having similar goals to me. Pride of place goes to Larry
Sanger's blog about Citizendium <http://blog.citizendium.org/>. The more I
work on Tinfinger the more I am appreciating how the 5-second elevator pitch
I have been using - "Tinfinger will do to the Who's Who what Wikipedia did
to the Encyclopedia Britannica" - means that we will have to learn a lot
from the Wikipedia experience.

Citizendium has already made many mistakes in trying to break free from the
Wikipedia model while still retaining many of its advantages. Larry's latest
post, entitled We Aren't
Wikipedia<http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/03/21/we-arent-wikipedia/>,
is the starkest illustration yet of what I think is his biggest error: he is
continually defining Citizendium in terms of comparisons to Wikipedia. In
January he and the CZ community made a fine decision to
unfork<http://blog.citizendium.org/2007/01/18/bye-bye-to-wikipedia-articles-hello-to-our-own-work/>,
which should have been the impetus to delete all references to Wikipedia not
only from the content pages, but also in the minds of the contributors. Yet
Larry spent many post-unfork blog posts detailing his criticisms of the
Essjay scandal, and he never lets an opportunity pass to bag the big W for
some ethical slight or another, as if he thinks that is what motivates the
CZ base. It may well be what motivates them, but if so, then that's not the
basis for a healthy community IMO. You want people who are in your community
for the community's sake, not just to spite some other project.

As for Tinfinger, we only share Citizendium's similarities with Wikipedia on
items 5, 7 and 8 in Larry's list. We do share more differences, though: all
but item 7 fit us to some extent. More details on how all of this works
closer to the full launch.

The reason I have got so far into this debate is that Tinfinger is going to
adopt Wikipedia's data structure: unique identifier strings for pages, which
are cross-linked via category, type and property metatags for which pages
are automatically generated. We have downloaded the relevant data from
dbpedia.org of the roughly 60,000 profiles of people in Wikipedia. Instead
of being stored in text-based infoboxes, however, we will store the tags as
relational data in rows of MySQL tables to allow greater granularity in
searches. However, like Citizendium, we will not republish any Wikipedia
articles.

I don't know what that means in terms of licensing - the
Wikipedia:Copyrights
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights>page doesn't talk
about this issue - which is part of why I'm stating this
in public. Perhaps there are lawyers well-versed in the GDFL who can tell me
whether taking just the titles and metadata of these profile articles, not
any of the prose text, means that the GDFL still applies. I want to act in
good faith here, so I need some help."

I have no idea whether GFDL covers this or not.

Regards


Keith Old