[WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations

[Bryan Derksen]

----- Original Message -----
From: jidanni at jidanni.org
Date: Friday, March 21, 2008 2:59 pm
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Deletions snapped up by commercial organizations
To: wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org

> Go ahead and rabidly delete articles. They'll only get snapped 
> up by commercial organizations.

I'm hoping Knol will turn out to be a good repository for "rescued" material like this. It's more likely to be properly licensed and attributed, since Google is likely to care about that kind of thing, and since anyone can contribute and earn money from the ads the rescue effort can be done in a distributed manner more easily.

Of course, the GFDL requires a list of past authors to be included, which won't be available from just the last version. So rescuing articles that have been redirected rather than deleted will be easier. But I for one would be quite willing to dig out the deleted history of an article for anyone who asks, provided it wasn't deleted for  copyvio or libel or other such legal reasons. Is there a category I can put my userpage in to make that known, perhaps?