[Foundation-l] WMF blog post on Italian Wikipedia

[emijrp]

A good moment to remember this.

*Permit mirror sites.*

When information is available on the web only at one site, its availability
is vulnerable. A local problem—a computer crash, an earthquake or flood, a
budget cut, a change in policy of the school administration—could cut off
access for everyone forever. To guard against loss of the encyclopedia's
material, we should make sure that every piece of the encyclopedia is
available from many sites on the Internet, and that new copies can be put up
if some disappear.

There is no need to set up an organization or a bureaucracy to do this,
because Internet users like to set up “mirror sites” which hold duplicate
copies of interesting web pages. What we must do in advance is ensure that
this is legally permitted.

Therefore, each encyclopedia article and each course should explicitly grant
irrevocable permission for anyone to make verbatim copies available on
mirror sites. This permission should be one of the basic stated principles
of the free encyclopedia.

Some day there may be systematic efforts to ensure that each article and
course is replicated in many copies—perhaps at least once on each of the six
inhabited continents. This would be a natural extension of the mission of
archiving that libraries undertake today. But it would be premature to make
formal plans for this now. It is sufficient for now to resolve to make sure
people have permission to do this mirroring when they get around to it.
 —Richard M. Stallman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_M._Stallman>, The
Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning
Resource<http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html>



2011/10/5 Jay Walsh <jwalsh at wikimedia.org>

> Hi folks - apologies for starting a new thread on this topic...
>
> We've just posted a short blog post on the topic of the unfolding issues
> around Italian Wikipedia
>
>
> http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/04/regarding-recent-events-on-italian-wikipedia/
>
> We've had a few calls to WMF - not many, and we've responded with the basic
> messages in this post.
>
> Thanks,
> jay
>
> --
> Jay Walsh
> Head of Communications
> WikimediaFoundation.org
> blog.wikimedia.org
> +1 (415) 839 6885 x 6609, @jansonw
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