[Wikipedia-l] Re: Enciclopedia Libre

[Lars Aronsson]

Mark Williamson wrote:

> If they're so innocent, why would they be hurt by "half-sung songs"?

Come on, Mark.  Part of your description matches myself and my 
website susning.nu, a big non-English wiki.  Some readers might 
believe that you are pointing at me, and conclude that the other 
information is some kind of truth about me.  That hurts me.  If 
you really believe what you wrote, then I'm here to clarify any 
misunderstandings and answer your questions.  If you mean someone 
else, you will save me a lot of trouble by saying so.

Perhaps you mean Erik Möller and his infoAnarchy?  Perhaps you 
mean Jimbo Wales and his Wikicities?

I'll assume the worst, and clarify your points as if they were 
relating to me.  As far as I know, you don't speak Swedish and are 
not a contributor to the Swedish Wikipedia, and so it disturbs me 
to learn that you might have such strong and possibly damaging 
opinions about me.  Who gave you these impressions?  Should you be 
more careful with trusting your sources?

> > > I was thinking of another non-English semifork of Wikipedia 

Susning.nu has never been a fork (or "semifork", whatever that is) 
of Wikipedia.  It is a big Swedish wiki that I started from 
scratch after Larry Sanger made it clear that what I wanted to do 
would fall outside of Wikipedia's strictly encyclopedic scope. Not 
a single text has been copied or translated from Wikipedia to 
Susning.nu.  If that happened, it would be a copyright violation 
(unless the author dual licensed the text), since susning.nu does 
not enforce the GFDL license like Wikipedia does.  In many cases, 
susning.nu contributors have later copied their own texts to the 
Swedish Wikipedia, which of course is perfectly OK.

> > > which has way more articles than the Wikipedia version, and 

This could be said a year ago, but today Susning.nu has 58,400 
articles, while the Swedish Wikipedia has 80,600.

> > > whose owner is deeply involved in Wikipedia but while 

I'm not "deeply involved" in Wikipedia.  I'm an occasional 
contributor (user:LA2), but I've never been and have never aspired 
to be an administrator, bureaucrat, board member or developer of 
Wikipedia.  On the contrary, I've been extremely careful to point 
out the difference between the two projects, and kept myself at 
arm's length distance from anything Wikipedia.  I've never 
participated in any vote or opinion poll on how to run the 
project.

> > > bragging in private e-mails and on-list about how much work 
> > > he/she does compared to others to put more free content 
> > > online, 

Back in 1992, I started Project Runeberg (runeberg.org), the 
Scandinavian e-text project, which possibly was the first "clone" 
of Project Gutenberg. In the more than 12 years since, quite a lot 
of out-of-copyright literature has been digitized there, including 
several old encyclopedias. Much of this has benefited the Swedish, 
Danish, and Finnish Wikipedia.  No description of who I am would 
be complete without mentioning this.  I've spent more hours on 
Project Runeberg than on any job or hobby I've ever had.

> > > does not consider allowing the corresponding language 
> > > version of Wikipedia to share content.

I'm contributing *some* of my texts and photos to Wikipedia, but 
that's not to say that everything I write or do is released for 
free.  Especially, the texts that I wrote for susning.nu are under 
my copyright without open licensing.  What others do with their 
texts on susning.nu is their decision, and the site does not force 
contributors to use any particular license.  In practice, this 
makes mirroring of the entire site impossible, and that is a 
deliberate choice; I don't believe in website mirroring.  I've 
also written texts and software for other purposes and customers.  
These texts belong to me or my customers and the copyright holders 
decide what or how to license them.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se