On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 02:58:39PM -0700, Anthere wrote:
I am not sure you really realise what you are writing here Jan.
That could be, I am not a native English speaking person, so my remarks are sometimes a bit unpolished. I hope you understand. :-)
Consider carefully the "it wastes effort but we can still copy articles from them" and vice versa - thank you for it actually, some of us that do great copies of the en.wiki do put the link each time. Not so much to give you credit maybe, than to try to link our wikis together rather than making separate wikis... Now, if you understand french (are you belgian ?), we would be most delighted to see you copy an article from the fr.site one day...
I have been living and working in Belgium for a year, but am Dutch by birth. Unfortunately I don't really speak French although I usually can manage to read a French newspaper, but since I am living in Belgium I'm slowly trying to pick up again the French I was taught for six years in school. So maybe I will, one day. :-) But I digress...
I was not really thinking about copying between the English wikipedia to wikipedias in other languages, but from wikipedias at wikipedia.com to forks in the same language. The "us" in my remark was not the English wikipedia but the whole of wikipedias at wikipedia.com. This is probably because I have no idea about the fights that have been fought over the possible forks of non-English wikipedias, so my ideas of "us" and "them" might be different from yours. I have the feeling that you have concluded that I am one of "them".
I also have the impression that you think that I would be against copying things from wikipedia. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole reason that I find wikipedia interesting is that its contents are open and placed under a licence that keeps it open. It is very important to me that Bomis does not own the contents of wikipedia.
Also consider very carefully the "does our license then FORCE them to put a link on every article that they have copied from the original site" That's an interesting comment. Indeed I'd like to know what the licence says about that !
It wasn't a comment, it was a question. But I have to admit that I mainly asked it to see what Jimbo's opionion would be. Did you read the GFDL on this, especially section 4? There's more to the GFDL than just that the modified work should again be under the GFDL.
Let's be serious. I consider great that some french speaking come and visit from time to time. We must somehow get over these cultural differences.
Well, here in Belgium they seem to have several cultures within a single country. It's not always easy but in general they make it work here. I don't see why that couldn't be the case for wikipedia.
Sincères amitiés
-- Jan Hidders