On 9/28/07, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/27/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Close on 50% of the images on en are non free. Text on the other hand? A few percent maybe.
Maybe you mean "a few percent" of all articles contain unfree exerpts of a larger published work... I could stomach that.
But saying "a few percent" of all article text is unfree... that seems excessive, and hopefully incorrect.
Well, it depends on what we're looking at, but I assume most articles contain at the very least quotations under copyright. I would be surprised if the absolute number of articles with copyrighted text in them is only a few percent. I would not be surprised if the overall proportion of copyrighted text in Wikipedia, however, is a few percent - that seems about right. You can't write a proper, comprehensive encyclopaedia article without quoting someone (be it a historian, the article's subject, etc.), unless you're intentionally going out of your way to make life difficult for yourself and your readership.
Johnleemk