[WikiEN-l] If anyone ever says Wikipedia is too deletionist

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Ken Arromdee<arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Jul 2009, Dan Dascalescu wrote:
>> While deletionist folks are at removing the poem from Wikipedia, why
>> don't you delete it from Wikiquote as well? Here's the page, for your
>> convenience:
>>
>> http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Niem%C3%B6ller
>>
>> Have fun improving Wikipedia.
>
> In this case I don't think there's much choice.  The poem is copyrighted and
> we're not allowed to use it.
>
> In general, the problem is our free content policy.  We're not allowed to
> use material when permission has been given to Wikipedia, but not to the
> world.  There's no way that Niemoller's heirs would consent to the poem
> being used to advertise fast food, and they probably wouldn't even let it be
> used for political causes they disagree with.

If you have an article analysing the poem and the various critiques
and reactions to it and the (whisper it) popular culture, er, I meant
the cultural depictions, then the article is fine. You might even have
the whole poem in there, but chopped up and quoted in different parts
of the article. That is legitimate non-free use (and fair use). Entire
quotation, no.

A picture of the poem is more tricky, because that could be used in a
fast food advert (to use your example). The equivalent with text is
that the entire WP article could be printed and used in some fashion.
But if someone copied the text of the poem from Wikipedia and printed
it on a T-shirt, is that the fault of WP's free licence model? Only if
they credit WP, in my view. If they don't credit, they could have got
the text of the poem from anywhere.

Carcharoth