[Wikipedia-l] Re: Oregon City and Bryce Harrington

[Jimmy Wales]

There's a difference between what the GNU FDL will allow, and what we
prefer here.  Part of the design rationale for the GNU FDL is for
authors to be able to retain credit for their work.  This we must
respect, through the article history, and there are aspects of this
which are imperfect in our current implementation.

But socially and traditionally on the wikipedia, we have a strong
culture of non-ownership of articles, in the sense that we don't think
of individual articles as "ours".  Someone who wants permanent
"credit" for an article, using the mechanisms of the GNU FDL, may
contribute things that we have to respectfully decline in order to
keep our wiki nature.

So, Ram-Man, yes, you are right, it would have been not well received socially
had you wanted to put your name into all those articles.


Digital Addictions Software wrote:

> I was the person who noticed the Oregon City article had a copyright notice
> WITH an invariant section that the notice could not be removed.  This violates
> the copyright agreement to add to Wikipedia (no invariant sections).  I
> respectfully asked Bryce to remove the incompatibility or delete his additions
> that he claimed credit for.  He removed the invariant section.  Let me make the
> rest of this discussion a practical one.  Who among us would have accepted it
> if I would put at the end of *every* 30,000 or so city articles a message that
> the articles were mine and copyrighted "2002 Derek Ramsey"?  I am pretty sure
> (unless I misunderstand) that if you add to Wikipedia you give your consent to
> let others modify your work.  That may mean eliminating it, removing your
> copyright notice, or whatever they feel like doing.  Wikipedia has a copyright
> notice and that should be sufficient.  If you can't agree to it, you can't add
> articles, no matter how much we want them.
> 	Ram-Man
> 
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