[WikiEN-l] Citizendium

[Carcharoth]

On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 2:46 AM,  <wjhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>> Interestingly, this feeds into a current discussion going on about the
>> use of PD text. The discussion (which may have got a little out of
>> hand, is on the talk page of the Signpost's article about plagiarism).
>> The basis of part of the subthread is whether it is morally right to
>> take someone's PD work, to republish it as a Wikipedia article (with a
>> template at the bottom providing attribution), and to then leave it to
>> the tender mercies of the Wiki editing process. At what point might
>> the author of the original PD text no longer want to be credited for
>> writing the text that "seeded" the eventual result on Wikipedia?
>>
>> And does it make a difference if the author of the PD text is long
>> dead and the text is PD "by age" or if the author is alive and the
>> text has been released as PD by the author's employer, or if the
>> author himself released it as a PD text?
>>
>> Or to put it another way - is it acceptable for Wikipedia to co-opt
>> other authors into the "collective credit" that the authors of a
>> Wikipedia article take for that article?
>
> To answer your last point, yes, it's acceptable.
>
> However here is how I would do it.  Put the PD item on WikiSOURCE, and
> then from the Wikipedia article, initially identical, point at the
> WikiSource article "Original version is here...."

That has been suggested, and is done in some articles already.

> For the 1911 EB articles we say something like "This article
> *incorportates* information from the 1911 EB..."  or something like
> that.

A good list of such templates is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Template_messages/Sources_of_articles#Including_third-party_content

> If the author who is placing their material PD, not by age, doesn't
> like what people do with it, they shouldn't have made it PD.  I mean
> you can't give away your cake and then claim that it shouldn't be eaten.

Agreed. But is it the whole text, parts of the texts, the ideas
expressed in the text, the original wording and structure of the text,
that are PD, or only some of those? Obviously, if a PD text quotes a
copyrighted text, there are still restrictions on how that can be used
or re-used. And if you were quoting from the main text of a PD text,
you would still put the quote of PD text in quotation marks. Or would
you?

How would you make a decision on whether to paraphrase, summarise, or
quote verbatim, all or part of the PD text, and in which cases would
you not use quotation marks to offset what you are quoting or
republishing, from the rest of your work?

Carcharoth