[WikiEN-l] No-indexing of project-space pages

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Do I understand correctly that those who do not just
> download our non-mainspace (you know the real wikipedia
> stuff of articles like of an encyclopaedic value), do it with
> full knowledge that isn't really encyclopaedic matter, but
> download it anyway?

They have the option to download only articles. We can't guess their
understanding or motivation.  I think that they are just grabbing the
first thing that works is the more obvious theory. ;)

> On the gripping hand the arguments I have heard
> against adjusting the licencing of the non-mainspace
> pages has been on the basis of not providing free
> web-hosting, so everything has to be copy-left.
>
> Somehow I don't think that equation passes the
> sniff test.
>
> Particularly in the light of the fact that the
> MediaWiki help-pages are already definitely
> *not* copy-left, but decisively PD.

You're free to make your contributions more liberally licensed, just not less.

If you want to post information about yourself under a restrictive
license, there are lots of low to no cost web hosts that allow it. So
long as you're a contributor the projects are very permissive about
making your userpage just a link to your website, as far as I've seen.

Beyond the "avoiding free webhosting", keeping the project spaces
freely licensed contributes to keeping freely licensed content part of
the culture and superordinate goal.

In any case, if nazi-pedia is really trying to make it look like
you're a contributor there, they could do amply well without copying
your Wikipedia userpage. :)  Licensing is not the right tool to use
against fraud. It's a wrong fit.