[Wikipedia-l] toki pona

[Mark Williamson]

Well, I for one felt it was nessecary to replace all content with
copyvio notices because it states explicitly on the Toki Pona homepage
that Toki Pona is copyrighted. In a cursory Google search, just to
make sure I wasn't missing some sort of release by Sonja of the
information into the public domain or under some sort of terms, I
found no page under which Sonja released the language in any sort of
way.

While it is debatable whether or not a language is copyrightable (see
Lojban), I feared for Wikipedias interests and so took down those
pages immediately pending further investigation.

Some have raised the point that a significant number of the pages were
written by Sonja herself, and thus were explicitly released under the
terms of the gfdl when she clicked "submit".

I have two things to say to that:

1. At the time I did not realise this.

2. Since I suspected that they were copyvios, rather than checking the
history of each of 200-odd pages I simply replaced them all.

Since it appears they were indeed *not* copyvio, the appropriate
course of action is simply to revert them to their previous versions
after it has been shown that they aren't copyvio, and then keep going
from where you were.

Whether or not I am blocked from all projects is obviously not my
choice, but I will submit that I have contributed much to the
community. For example, just in the past couple of days I have made
logos for over a dozen Wikipedias, and posted them on Meta. I am also
(at least I think) partially responsible for the founding of fo: and
lb: (I informed people of the possibility of creating them).

Anyhow the decision doesn't rest in my hands. I will not object if it
is decided that I should be blocked or banned or whatever, I will only
defend myself against specific arguments.

--node

On Wed, 22 Sep 2004 03:45:36 +0100, Angela_ <beesley at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've just reverted over 200 edits on the toki pona Wikipedia. Someone
> apparently feels the language is copyrighted so decided to replace
> every page, including user pages and the main page, with a copyright
> violation notice, presumably with the use of a bot. I've reverted
> these, although unfortunately the "bot rollback" failed on later pages
> so recent changes is a mess. I haven't deleted anything, so if people
> want to see the pages, such as "copyviopedia" this person created they
> can still do so.
> 
> As far as I am aware Sonja Kisa, the creator of the language, has
> released it under the GFDL, but I can't find any mailing list evidence
> to back this up.
> 
> If this is not the case, the wiki should obviously be removed but
> vandalizing hundreds of pages is not the way to go about this. I
> suggest we wait to hear from Sonja on the status of the copyright and
> remove it she can not confirm it is GFDL.
> 
> Angela.
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