[Wikipedia-l] An experiment - how 'complete' is the wikipedia?

[Andre Engels]

It has nothing to do with your experiment, but one of the pages you mentioned
had a subject that was very close to my own interests, and when I looked at it,
I found some remarkable things:

> 3) Jean François La Pérouse - fairly stubby, but contains several
> paragraphs of complete information so it looks like an 'article' to the
> casual passerby. Three active links, and three blanks.

The first thing I noticed is that we have a second, longer article on this
person, under "La Pérouse". Reading that second one gave me a shock. It was
copyrighted material - of which I am quite certain, since I am the one who
wrote it. See http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/discovery/perouse.html

Of course I hereby give Wikipedia my blessing to further use the material,
but I do get worried that this might mean that there is more copyrighted
material on Wikipedia than we sometimes suspect (the text in question had
been given free for further use, but on stricter terms than an open source
license, in particular by forbidding commercial use).

Andre Engels