[WikiEN-l] NASA meatballs and wikipedia meatheads

[geni]

On 01/04/2008, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have my own policy about people inventing their own policies and
>  unilaterally applying them to the wikipedia- I revert on sight.

In this case the people would be the foundation. Per

"All projects are expected to host only content which is under a Free
Content License, or which is otherwise free as recognized by the
'Definition of Free Cultural Works' as referenced above."

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Licensing_policy

http://freedomdefined.org/Definition is wikipedia policy

Check out the "The freedom to distribute derivative works" section


>  I found one bunch of clowns systematically removing all safety related
>  information relating to certain chemicals from the wikipedia. 'In case
>  somebody used the information and got hurt and then wikipedia could be
>  liable' and 'it's all in the msds' anyway'. But a fair amount of it
>  wasn't in the msds's and yeah, it was referenced.
>
>  Seems to me this is pretty similar; you appear to be worried that
>  somebody, somewhere doing something that is not routinely done on the
>  wikipedia could possibly break the law.
>
>  You know what? Yeah, they could. And how is this the wikipedia's
>  problem?

Because it is a problem caused by the material being non free.

>We don't encourage them, on the contrary we tag our images
>  with the restrictions - and there are ALWAYS restrictions.

Restrictions on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Grays_Thurrockmap_1946.jpg

?

>And if we
>  find an illegal image on the wikipedia we delete it.

That would depend on exactly how you define illegal. There are images
on wikipedia that run into issues with US statute law.

>  The NASA license is free for all the normal things that the wikipedia
>  and people that make use of our material use these images for.

People use our images for all sorts of stuff. Old Negro Space Program
fan art would be far from the weirdest.

> In
>  *that* sense, it's FREE. I don't care beyond that, provided it's
>  correctly tagged with the license, I really don't, and I *really*
>  don't think you should either.

Someone has to. Once of the annoying things about wikipedia is that
what was last week a weird corner case is this week something that
happened three times. You might think say that the question exactly of
what documents of state management means under North Korean law isn't
significant but the issue has arisen.


-- 
geni