[Foundation-l] content ownership in different projects

[Strainu]

2011/6/17 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> 2011/6/17 Strainu <strainu10 at gmail.com>:
>> I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in
>> other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the
>> wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot
>> consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA
>> license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control
>> offered by copyright laws.
>
> It's not so much about CC-BY-SA as it is about the fact that it's a
> wiki, where content is constantly changed by different people. This
> breaks the usual idea of authorship and makes quite a lot of people
> terribly uncomfortable and sometimes even violent. It's unpleasant,
> but i understand how their feel and i want to find a way to work with
> them.
>

Well, a wiki promotes a certain way of collaborating, but that is not
always sufficient. Think about a CC-BY-NC-ND wiki. Theoretically, one
could only add content to that wiki, not edit what has already been
written. Also, there are many © wikis, used only as CMSs, not to
collaborate. That's why I believe that WP:OWN would be much harder to
justify if we wouldn't be using CC-BY-SA.

Anyhow, my previous email presents a problem seen in many policies on
multiple languages. Experienced wikimedians refer to policies with
ease, by using shortcuts and assuming that the discussion partner
knows what the policy is about. More often than not, this is not the
case. This problem has been raised many times before and will probably
be raised again in the future. It is in no way specific to WP:OWN.

Strainu