Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Well, after http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Impression this project has been started (see also discussion on meta forum, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Alleged Commercialisation of the French Wikipedia) I decided not to upload any images on Commons with resolution higher than 800x600 any more. (This resolution is perfectly fine to illustrate the articles but is substandard for any commercial use). One of the stewards, MaxSem, has left all Wikimedia projects because of this initiative. Therefore, I do not quite understand what we are talking about. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Hoi, It has always been permitted to use the Commons work commercially. It has always been explicitly prohibited to disallow non commercial use. There are two options: either we only allow OTHERS to make money or we can make some money as well. I disagree that 800x600 is perfectly fine because, it may be fine for online content but it is not fine when printed. What is it that makes you oppose us to make money in order to support our activities ? I am surprised that you or MaxSem take this position. I do not quite understand why you did not realise earlier that allowing commercial use is what we have always done. Thanks, GerardM 2009/1/22 Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru Well, after http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Impression this project has been started (see also discussion on meta forum, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Forum#Alleged Commercialisation of the French Wikipedia) I decided not to upload any images on Commons with resolution higher than 800x600 any more. (This resolution is perfectly fine to illustrate the articles but is substandard for any commercial use). One of the stewards, MaxSem, has left all Wikimedia projects because of this initiative. Therefore, I do not quite understand what we are talking about. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu wrote: On Wednesday 21 January 2009 19:32:15 Erik Moeller wrote: 2009/1/20 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same. That's probably true, Nikola. The proposed attribution language is intended to balance the various positions (ranging from 'an URL should always be fine' to 'names should always be given'), the established I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. I'd say the key to this whole relicensing debate is that the positions shouldn't be balanced. It is my firm conviction that you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals. Thus, the arguments about how difficult and onerous it is to give credit fall on deaf ears. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to credit people. People have a right to be credited, and printing a URL in a book or on a T-shirt or at the end of a movie doesn't cut it. This is especially true because *it's the Wikimedia Foundation's fault* that it's so difficult to track authors in the first place. I personally was arguing for more care to be taken in this space and/or an *opt-in* move to a dual licensing scheme (and adoption of the real name field) *over 4 years ago* (yes Mike, I double-checked this one). The fact that these concerns were ignored for so long *is not the fault of the authors*. Our rights should not be violated or balanced away. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Hoi, Sam I asked a question and you conveniently snipped that out. So you did not reply to my question and consequently your statement of not at all does not relate to what I wrote.. If you are of the opinion that things can be done differently, please explain how. A printer makes money, that is how he earns his crust. So how would non-profit printing work. Does it exist ? You are also under the impression that we are meeting our targets.. What do you know of the financial position of the French chapter and what do you know of its ambitions ? Thanks, GerardM 2009/1/22 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.comwrote: It has always been permitted to use the Commons work commercially. It has always been explicitly prohibited to disallow non commercial use. snip I am surprised that you or MaxSem take this position. I do not quite understand why you did not realise earlier that allowing commercial use is what we have always done. That is not at all the point - this is a slippery slope indeed and a dangerous precedent to set, especially at the chapter level. There are potentially ways it could be done properly (eg open access to suppliers meeting a certain standard, non-profit printing, etc.) but so long as we're meeting our targets the potential cost does not seem to be at all worth the significant risk. I hope MaxSem returns once sanity prevails, Sam ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Hoi, The French chapter is a non profit organisation and France is not confined to a single language or a single project. When the French chapter aims to support the Wiki community and does this in France by doing similar things to the Germans, I can only applaud them. By opening up the French cultural heritage to us, all our project will benefit. By running projects locally, the WMF organisation does not need to be involved the Germans brought us the Tool server, I will happy to learn how the French will make a difference. Consequently the notion that we will not all benefit from the work of the French chapter is hard to support. Thanks, GerardM 2009/1/22 Yaroslav M. Blanter pute...@mccme.ru i dont think the argument here is that people can make money from commons and the pictures etc, its the fact (as i see it) that a commercial site has a link from the french wikipedia side bar to their site to make a profit. what is the difference between this and link spamming and advertising. Well, this is one point. Another point is, as far as I know, Wikimedia.fr, which benefits from the commercial use, does not transfer money to support other projects. I would not object to commercial use of MY pictures if I knew that the profit is in a transparent (like donations) way invested in the infrastructure of the whole foundation. So far, I have not seen any evidence that this is the case. On the contrary, the main argument in the discussion was We have decided to do it in French Wikipedia, and Meta has nothing to say about this. I disagree that 800x600 is perfectly fine because, it may be fine for online content but it is not fine when printed. Not really, I can print it out and it works fine. But not as a poster of course. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Hello, On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Mark (Markie) newsmar...@googlemail.com wrote: i dont think the argument here is that people can make money from commons and the pictures etc, its the fact (as i see it) that a commercial site has a link from the french wikipedia side bar to their site to make a profit. what is the difference between this and link spamming and advertising. i have no objections to people making money, especially if it benefits WMF but i do have a problem with third parties using wikipedia to place links so they can make money How is this posters project any different from what we already do with PediaPress? -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: I'd say the key to this whole relicensing debate is that the positions shouldn't be balanced. It is my firm conviction that you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals. Thus, the arguments about how difficult and onerous it is to give credit fall on deaf ears. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to credit people. People have a right to be credited, and printing a URL in a book or on a T-shirt or at the end of a movie doesn't cut it. This is especially true because *it's the Wikimedia Foundation's fault* that it's so difficult to track authors in the first place. I personally was arguing for more care to be taken in this space and/or an *opt-in* move to a dual licensing scheme (and adoption of the real name field) *over 4 years ago* (yes Mike, I double-checked this one). The fact that these concerns were ignored for so long *is not the fault of the authors*. Our rights should not be violated or balanced away. Questions: 1) Why doesn't a URL to a comprehensive history list cut it? If anything, I would prefer the URL be used instead of a simple list of pseudonyms because the URL will contain the revision history and will display not only who has edited the page, but also the magnitude of those contributions. Also, the URL doesn't cut out only 5 of the authors from the list when a reuser adds a title page (thus removing all credit from the vast majority of contributors). 2) Printing a small list of pseudonyms of the back of a T-shirt is no more helpful then the illegible legal disclaimers on TV commercials. Sure they satisfy the letter of the law but certainly violate it's spirit. A small comma-separated list tacked on to the end of a printed version, or scribbled on the bottom of a coffee cup may satisfy the letter of the attribution clause, but certainly does not satisfy it's spirit. Is it really better to have a list of authors that may be illegible, not-searchable and not-sortable? Wouldn't attribution be better handled by a well-designed web interface? Is it better for reusers to determine what is the best way to give credit, when we can give credit in a very positive and well thought-out way and let reusers simply tap into that? --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Yaroslav M. Blanter wrote: i dont think the argument here is that people can make money from commons and the pictures etc, its the fact (as i see it) that a commercial site has a link from the french wikipedia side bar to their site to make a profit. what is the difference between this and link spamming and advertising. Well, this is one point. Another point is, as far as I know, Wikimedia.fr, which benefits from the commercial use, does not transfer money to support other projects. I would not object to commercial use of MY pictures if I knew that the profit is in a transparent (like donations) way invested in the infrastructure of the whole foundation. So far, I have not seen any evidence that this is the case. On the contrary, the main argument in the discussion was We have decided to do it in French Wikipedia, and Meta has nothing to say about this. I disagree that 800x600 is perfectly fine because, it may be fine for online content but it is not fine when printed. Not really, I can print it out and it works fine. But not as a poster of course. Cheers Yaroslav --- and ... - this is a slippery slope indeed and a dangerous precedent to set, especially at the chapter level. There are potentially ways it could be done properly (eg open access to suppliers meeting a certain standard, non-profit printing, etc.) but so long as we're meeting our targets the potential cost does not seem to be at all worth the significant risk. I hope MaxSem returns once sanity prevails, Sam --- and Hoi, The French chapter is a non profit organisation and France is not confined to a single language or a single project. When the French chapter aims to support the Wiki community and does this in France by doing similar things to the Germans, I can only applaud them. By opening up the French cultural heritage to us, all our project will benefit. By running projects locally, the WMF organisation does not need to be involved the Germans brought us the Tool server, I will happy to learn how the French will make a difference. Consequently the notion that we will not all benefit from the work of the French chapter is hard to support. Thanks, GerardM Couple of quick clarifications/reminders 1. This project was not started and developped by the French chapter, but by a wikipedia participant, who happened to ask the support of the French Chapters. Which we agreed to offer. So, there is no slippery slope. 2. The French Wikipedia community has done an non-exclusive arrangement. Only one company has been involved for now because it was the only one interested and because it was interesting to first test the concept. If you look carefully at the interface, it is quite obvious it is planned to welcome other companies; as well as to welcome community feedback on quality of service provided. 3. There is very little difference between this project and the Pediapress one. Actually, the only serious difference is that one make a donation to Wikimedia France and the other to Wikimedia Foundation. The other serious difference is that one is ported by Wikimedia Foundation and the other one ported by the community. 4. Prior to starting the service, the company spontaneously made a 500 euros donation to Wikimedia Foundation. And was disappointed to learn afterward that it would not be tax deductible. Wikimedia France provides this deductibility, hence augmenting the chance of higher donation from the company. 5. I see comments as well claiming that the operations of the French chapter do not benefit the projects. Please find here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Supported_by_Wikimedia_France the list of all pictures that could be added to Wikimedia Commons and our common pool of knowledge only THANKS to Wikimedia France (through funding of the amateur photographs travel to various famous event, or through the accreditations provided by Wikimedia France to access press areas in order to take good quality pictures). That category, supported by Wikimedia France, already host 800 good quality freely-licenced images. 6. I also see comments claiming that the benefits of Wikimedia France is not transparently reinvested in the entire infrastructure. You will find the financial report of the association: - in 2005: http://wikimedia.fr/share/rapport_financier_WMFrance2005.pdf grand total: 2721 euros - in 2006: http://wikimedia.fr/share/Rapportfinancier_final2006.pdf see details of expenses in the document. - in 2007: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimédia_France/Rapport_d%27activité_2007 Regarding 2008, our year report is not yet published. But you will be happy to learn that we spent 2059,99 euros for the digitization of old documents (put in wikisource) But more than that In november 2007, the board approved the following resolution which I will translate for you Résolution Le CA autorise la dépense de 2228€ pour l'achat (software +
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: I think you and I both know that your whole business of saying there are over 100 versions of CC-BY-SA was an attempt to try to create ambiguity and anxiety when there isn't really any. No, I could have accomplished quite the same point by saying that there are over 50 versions, which is clearly true (I'm actually still not convinced that over 100 isn't correct - I counted 92 just between 2.5 and 3.0, but I may have double-counted, there doesn't seem to be a clear list of them all). My point still stands. There are many versions of CC-BY-SA 3.0. The proposal should be specific as to which one(s) it is talking about. Adding the words any version of or all versions of or the Unported version of or the US version of would make this clear. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Anthony writes: The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. This is a very odd notion, and I find nothing in the language of any free license that supports it. Freely licensed photos, for example, don't have to have the attribution as part of the photo. Freely licensed texts don't require that attribution occur *within* the text proper -- it can occur at the beginning or the end. (You can imagine how much more difficult a software manual would be to use if attribution had to occur right next to the incorporated text.) The whole notion that attribution is required part of the [substantive] work itself rather than adjacent to it, or easily reachable from it, is your invention, and, in my view, not a requirement of the language of free licenses. We honor free licenses by making it possible to determine the provenance of a work, not by making attribution part of the work itself. Nor has the notion of attribution ever been meant to be understood rigidly. As Richard Stallman says in his letter regarding the point-release change to GFDL: We have never asserted that we will not change our licenses, or that we will never make changes like this one. Rather, our commitment is that our changes to a license will stick to the spirit of that license, and will uphold the purposes for which we wrote it. Stallman also says this: We did this to allow those sites [such as Wikipedia] to make their licenses compatible with other large collections of copylefted material that they want to cooperate with. The ultimate question has to be whether we truly believe Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects really do aim to make it easier to spread free knowledge throughout the world -- there is a general acknowledgement that the particulars of the GFDL may make it hard for the projects to do this, and that is why FSF decided to allow the opportunity for dual-licensing of Wikipedia content under GFDL 1.3 and a particular subset of CC-BY-SA -- both requires attribution but acknowledge that massive collaborative projects raise special problems in balancing the need for attribution against the need to share free knowledge. If the former is ultimately seen as more important than the latter -- which is apparently your view, Anthony -- then we're scarcely better off under a free license than we were under the all rights reserved regime of traditional copyright. I think Stallman's approach of sticking to the spirit of free licenses is the right attitude to have. Otherwise we stick to the letter of your requirement, Anthony, and lose the spirit altogether. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious). As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others. Frankly, I don't understand the point of printing a Wikipedia article on a T-shirt in the first place. This is a stupid example I include only for the sake of completeness, because others keep bringing it up. Sure they satisfy the letter of the law but certainly violate it's spirit. A small comma-separated list tacked on to the end of a printed version, or scribbled on the bottom of a coffee cup may satisfy the letter of the attribution clause, but certainly does not satisfy it's spirit. How many authors is a coffee cup going to have? Again, I don't understand why coffee cups are even a consideration. Think about any merchandising opportunity where text from an article is used: T-Shirts, mouse pads, coffee cups, posters, etc. We can't have a policy vis-a-vis attribution that only covers cases where its convenient to follow. If we're going to demand that attribution be treated like an anchor around the necks of our reusers, we need to make that demand uniform. Either that, or we need to recognize that the benefit to easy reuse of our content far outweighs the need to repeat gigantic author lists. Our authors contributed to our projects with the expectation that their content would be freely reusable. Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations. Demanding that authors be rigorously attributed despite having no expectations for it, while at the same time violating their expectations of free reuse doesn't quite seem to me to be a good course of action. I think reusers should determine what the best way is to give credit. However, if they can't meet a minimal standard, then they ought to not use the work at all. Letting reusers determine what is the best way is surely a pitfall. You're assuming that miraculously corporate interests are going to be preoccupied with providing proper attribution. If the requirements are too steep, people will either misapply them, abuse them, or ignore them completely. People who want to reuse our content will find themselves unable, and authors who could have gotten some attribution (even if not ideal) will end up with none. Requiring more attribution for our authors will have the effect of having less provided. Do you think this is really going to provide a benefit to our contributors? --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Andrew Whitworth wknight8...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious). As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others. Use my stuff, that's why I write it! I dual-licensed all my article space text and pictures as CC-by-sa any a while ago anyway. More people should do this IMO. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:30 AM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: Anthony writes: The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. This is a very odd notion, and I find nothing in the language of any free license that supports it. Well, first off, I wasn't referring to free licenses, I was referring to rights. That said, the GFDL requires authors to be listed in the section entitled History, and it clearly states that a section Entitled XYZ means a named subunit of the Document... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu wrote: We can develop tools that would identify principal authors with sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short enough to be practically included in full. I disagree with this assertion regarding automation and can think of many situations both in which this does not hold true, giving false negatives (e.g. single/initial uploads of large contributions, uploads using multiple aliases, imports, IP numbers and not-logged-in contributions, etc.) and false positives (e.g. minor edits not marked as such, spam/vandalism, comprehensive rewrites, deletions, abuse/'attribution whoring', etc.). The only 'tool' I can see being effective for identifying principal authors is discussion, which will invariably lead to conflict, create unnecessary risk for reusers and waste our most precious resource (volunteer time) en masse. Oh, and I would place anyone who considers their own interests taking precedence over those of the community (both within Wikipedia and the greater public) into the category of 'tool' too :) Please consider this, especially in light of recent research that shows that most Wikipedia contributors contribute from egoistic reasons ;) Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related) are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki. I might add that the argument that you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals is weak in this context, and that exactly the same can be (and has been) said in reverse: Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations. Sam ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious). As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others. I understand that viewpoint and think it is reasonable. How about adding a checkbox to preferences, that says allow attribution by URL? Our authors contributed to our projects with the expectation that their content would be freely reusable. Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations. Demanding that authors be rigorously attributed despite having no expectations for it, while at the same time violating their expectations of free reuse doesn't quite seem to me to be a good course of action. I think it's clear that at least some people expected to be attributed directly in any print edition encyclopedias made from Wikipedia. Do you deny that, or do you just think it doesn't matter? I think reusers should determine what the best way is to give credit. However, if they can't meet a minimal standard, then they ought to not use the work at all. Letting reusers determine what is the best way is surely a pitfall. You're assuming that miraculously corporate interests are going to be preoccupied with providing proper attribution. I qualified my statement with the fact that they do need to at least meet a minimal standard. That said, I believe that corporate interests *are* best served by providing proper attribution. There may be some short-term gains to be had by violating people's rights, but in the end doing so will kill the goose that lays the golden egg, so to speak. (They'll also be unable to distribute their content legally in most any jurisdiction in the world other than the United States.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Sam Johnston s...@samj.net wrote: Please consider this, especially in light of recent research that shows that most Wikipedia contributors contribute from egoistic reasons ;) Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related) are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki. I have Author at English Wikibooks listed very prominently on my Resume, and often reference it in cover letters I send out. This is especially true for job listings that require good communication skills. My work on Wikibooks, even if it showed nothing more then my proficiency in the English language, helped me get my current job. Part of my current responsibilities involve writing documentation, for which I was considered to be very qualified because of my work on Wikibooks. So I would say that yes, our editors can derive very real benefits from their work on Wiki. I will temper that by saying that it's up to the authors to derive that benefit themselves. We don't send out royalty checks so if authors want to be benefitted by their work here, they need to make it happen and not rely on other people properly applying attribution for them. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Sam Johnston s...@samj.net wrote: I might add that the argument that you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals is weak in this context, and that exactly the same can be (and has been) said in reverse: Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations. Even if that were true (and it isn't), that still wouldn't justify the violation of the rights of those authors who want and expected to be credited. If your statement were true (and it isn't), it would mean that the only right thing to do is to not use the work at all. To borrow a line from the GPL, If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: I understand that viewpoint and think it is reasonable. How about adding a checkbox to preferences, that says allow attribution by URL? Insofar as this satisfies my personal preference on the matter, I say that this is fine. If we added this checkbox to the software now there would be, of course, an argument about whether the box should be checked by default or not. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of user accounts are now abandoned, whatever we set for the default value of this box would become the de facto standard for attribution anyway. I think it's clear that at least some people expected to be attributed directly in any print edition encyclopedias made from Wikipedia. Do you deny that, or do you just think it doesn't matter? I don't deny it, but I am curious to see some evidence that this preference has indeed been made clear by some of our editors. I can't say that I've ever seen somebody express such a preference on Wikibooks, but then again we have a smaller community and are relatively insulated from discussions like this. To that effect, since people haven't clearly expressed this situation on Wikibooks, I think we could end up in a situation where different projects could handle their attribution requirements differently. The situation over there is sufficiently different for a number of reasons that it's probably not a good parallel anyway. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net: What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? Don't underestimate the enjoyment of looking through the page of credits at the back of a printed book and finding your name! People like to be acknowledged, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikipedia-l] vro
If you consider Norwegian nynorsk to be a dialect, you have your facts wrong. It is one of two written forms of norwegian, they have the same legal standing. Kjetil Lenes Lars Aronsson skreiv: Gerard Meijssen wrote: It is nice that you oppose, there are reasons why it might be a bad idea, but the ones that I know are not the ones you put forward. A reason why a change would be good is that it will prevent confusion. Come on, nobody is confused about what language Estonian is. If giving a language code to a local dialect means we have to rename all URLs for one of the major Wikipedias (Estonian is the 34th biggest, Bokmål is the 13th biggest), this only means we have to oppose all future assignments of new ISO language codes. It is OK to use the standard when naming new Wikipedias, but it's not OK to suddenly change a well-known address. We're here to spread free knowledge. That is not helped by renaming all of our URLs just because of some random ISO standard change. The no and et Wikipedias should be kept as they are. -- Kjetil Lenes OBS! Ny epostadresse: ekkoe...@online.no ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
There is an analogous project. The thousands of contributors of quotations exemplifying use to the Oxford English Dictionary have their names listed, though not with the items they sent. the principal ones are listed separately, but even those who sent in a single quotation are in a list. I know people who have done just that, and are quite reasonably very pleased to be included there. On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 Sam Johnston s...@samj.net: What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? Don't underestimate the enjoyment of looking through the page of credits at the back of a printed book and finding your name! People like to be acknowledged, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thursday 22 January 2009 00:20:14 Erik Moeller wrote: The attribution issue is so divisive, however, that I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn't be sensible to add at least a set of preferences to the licensing vote to better understand what people's preferred implementation would look like, within the scope of what we consider to be legally defensible parameters. In fact, I believe I have the solution that would satisfy everyone. Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served. Not really. Remember that reasonable to the medium or means statement? Any means that resulted in serious encumberment would be unlikely to be considered reasonable. Compared the issues caused by copyright notices it's a pretty minor problem. It's true that this is not the case for a large number of articles, but it's often the case for the most interesting ones. The proposed attribution language - to state names when there are fewer than six - is precisely written as a compromise. Evidences? -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth. Any system other than crediting everyone or crediting no one requires choosing people. How do you propose that to be done? And why doesn't the person that contributed the 6th most text (say) not deserve to be credited for their work? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/1/21 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. For example, everyone who believes that an URL should be fine is also OK if all names are given, but not the other way around. That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served. But they granted a license to use their work under the GFDL, didn't they? The GFDL certainly allows listing all names, doesn't it? If you're saying these people have a right to revoke the GFDL from their work, well, I won't argue against you. But I find it strange that you would argue this. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The attribution issue is so divisive, however, that I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn't be sensible to add at least a set of preferences to the licensing vote to better understand what people's preferred implementation would look like, within the scope of what we consider to be legally defensible parameters. If more than 10% or so of voters want direct attribution, it'll probably be enough of a critical mass to support a fork, licensed under the GFDL 1.2 only. I don't know if it's going to be that high or not, though. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Milos Rancic wrote: * If it is about printed work, it should point at least to the appropriate printed work. It is really not any kind of reasonable solution to allow pointing from less advanced medium to more advanced medium. Independent of the relicensing debate, I don't understand this comment at all. Printed works very commonly include URLs to point people to material that is online. Some amount of adjustment has been involved as people sorted out the issues involved, but at this point it's quite routine. So I don't see why we should imagine for ourselves a rule against pointing to the web from print. (Or vice versa, for those people who think Wikipedia citations have to be to something available online.) --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The attribution issue is so divisive, however, that I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn't be sensible to add at least a set of preferences to the licensing vote to better understand what people's preferred implementation would look like, within the scope of what we consider to be legally defensible parameters. If more than 10% or so of voters want direct attribution, it'll probably be enough of a critical mass to support a fork, licensed under the GFDL 1.2 only. Nope. The GFDL 1.2 license is so bad that any fork would still be looking to use CC just in a slightly more legal way. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: 2009/1/22 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served. Not really. Remember that reasonable to the medium or means statement? Any means that resulted in serious encumberment would be unlikely to be considered reasonable. Compared the issues caused by copyright notices it's a pretty minor problem. I really don't see how adding 2 pages of names to a 35 page article is a serious encumberment. Now read that article outloud and record it. Reasonable to the medium or means in this case however lets people follow the common practice of putting the credit on the record sleeve /CD jewel case. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Milos Rancic wrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Milos Rancic wrote: * If it is about printed work, it should point at least to the appropriate printed work. It is really not any kind of reasonable solution to allow pointing from less advanced medium to more advanced medium. Independent of the relicensing debate, I don't understand this comment at all. Printed works very commonly include URLs to point people to material that is online. Some amount of adjustment has been involved as people sorted out the issues involved, but at this point it's quite routine. So I don't see why we should imagine for ourselves a rule against pointing to the web from print. (Or vice versa, for those people who think Wikipedia citations have to be to something available online.) This is not about giving more informations, but about giving the basic informations about the work related to the legal issues. My amateur knowledge of law says to me that I am always able to ask for printed legal document, even electronic one is available and preferable. While you should better know how the right to get authors list in appropriate form is connected with my right to demand printed legal document, I see them very connected and I think that we should act as they are connected. (Note, again, that this is not about referring to a document as a literature, but to referring to the authors of the document, which is far from equal.) I'm afraid I simply don't understand what you're trying to say, then. It sounded like you were talking about having one document (web, print, whatever medium) point to another, something that might be done for attribution or a variety of other purposes. And if it's a question of pointing, I'm puzzled what difference it makes which medium is used or which direction one points across different media. I'm also not sure what you mean by a right to demand a printed legal document. It sounds sort of like you're referring to this as a right you hold as an author (whether as part of basic copyright or a moral right). That's not something I'm familiar with at all. So it's likely that I've not understood what you mean correctly there, either. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Now read that article outloud and record it. Reasonable to the medium or means in this case however lets people follow the common practice of putting the credit on the record sleeve /CD jewel case. Reasonable doesn't have to mean common practice. How about reading out the names at the end? It's going to be a worse ratio than pages of print (you can't read something in a small font size, after all), but it's still doable (especially with text-to-speech converters, so you don't have to waste time reading all the names). Reading credits at the end is pretty common practice for radio broadcasts, anyway, why not do the same for CDs?. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:19 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The attribution issue is so divisive, however, that I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn't be sensible to add at least a set of preferences to the licensing vote to better understand what people's preferred implementation would look like, within the scope of what we consider to be legally defensible parameters. If more than 10% or so of voters want direct attribution, it'll probably be enough of a critical mass to support a fork, licensed under the GFDL 1.2 only. Nope. The GFDL 1.2 license is so bad that any fork would still be looking to use CC just in a slightly more legal way. What about the GFDL 1.2 is so bad that it is unusable? Clean up the history tracking, add five names next to each article title, add a copyright statement at the bottom of each article, turn on the real name preference, and it seems like you could bring Wikipedia into compliance. You might have to forego dreams of a print edition, but frankly that doesn't seem very effective anyway. You could probably build a hand powered e-reader for less than the cost of printing all of Wikipedia - if not today than in the not too distant future. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thursday 22 January 2009 19:52:28 Thomas Dalton wrote: Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth. Any system other than crediting everyone or crediting no one requires choosing people. How do you propose that to be done? And why doesn't the person that contributed the 6th most text (say) not deserve to be credited for their work? I don't agree with that; I do believe that every author with significant (copyrightable) contribution should be credited. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: What about the GFDL 1.2 is so bad that it is unusable? Clean up the history tracking, add five names next to each article title, add a copyright statement at the bottom of each article, turn on the real name preference, and it seems like you could bring Wikipedia into compliance. You might have to forego dreams of a print edition, but frankly that doesn't seem very effective anyway. You could probably build a hand powered e-reader for less than the cost of printing all of Wikipedia - if not today than in the not too distant future. Wikipedia is in compliance with the GFDL. It's resuers who have serious issues. But then I've been through this with you many times and I don't see any reason to think you are any more likely to get it this time around. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: On Thursday 22 January 2009 19:52:28 Thomas Dalton wrote: Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth. Any system other than crediting everyone or crediting no one requires choosing people. How do you propose that to be done? And why doesn't the person that contributed the 6th most text (say) not deserve to be credited for their work? I don't agree with that; I do believe that every author with significant (copyrightable) contribution should be credited. So what was all that about only crediting 5 authors, or a list of authors less than 1% of the article length, or whatever else? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:54 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: What about the GFDL 1.2 is so bad that it is unusable? Clean up the history tracking, add five names next to each article title, add a copyright statement at the bottom of each article, turn on the real name preference, and it seems like you could bring Wikipedia into compliance. You might have to forego dreams of a print edition, but frankly that doesn't seem very effective anyway. You could probably build a hand powered e-reader for less than the cost of printing all of Wikipedia - if not today than in the not too distant future. Wikipedia is in compliance with the GFDL. So why can't a fork be in compliance with the GFDL? You said that The GFDL 1.2 license is so bad that any fork would still be looking to use CC just in a slightly more legal way. What do you mean by this? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thursday 22 January 2009 20:55:21 Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/1/22 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: On Thursday 22 January 2009 19:52:28 Thomas Dalton wrote: Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth. Any system other than crediting everyone or crediting no one requires choosing people. How do you propose that to be done? And why doesn't the person that contributed the 6th most text (say) not deserve to be credited for their work? I don't agree with that; I do believe that every author with significant (copyrightable) contribution should be credited. So what was all that about only crediting 5 authors, or a list of authors less than 1% of the article length, or whatever else? These are examples of possibilities for people who disagree with me. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: So why can't a fork be in compliance with the GFDL? You said that The GFDL 1.2 license is so bad that any fork would still be looking to use CC just in a slightly more legal way. What do you mean by this? What I mean is that if we consider the proposal to be legal under the CC license (I don't) then any fork would be better of using CC-BY-SA-3.0 without utilising the Attribution Parties bit of 4(C)(i). This means that it would get the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license without the downside that certain people appear to be trying to add. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Because radio broadcasts have far shorter credit lists. Yeah to an extent you can do it with CDs but for 45s that is right out. However the license itself specifies Reasonable to the medium or means so this does not present a problem. Surely you couldn't fit a read out version of [[France]] onto a 45? What matters is how much space (in what medium) the credits take in comparison to the content. Reading the credits to [[France]] may take quite a while compared to reading the article (maybe half as long? Possibly less, especially if you read the names pretty quickly), but media big enough to hold the whole article read out will probably be big enough to still have plenty of room to spare (reading the article might take, what, 30 mins? Can you think of a medium that can hold 30 mins of audio but not 45?). (These numbers are all guesses, I've never done any recording like this, so I don't know how long it's likely to end up being, but these figures should give a reasonable impression, I think.) So to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors is an attempt to fix a non problem using means of highly questionable legality under the terms of the license and non US law as well is deny wikipedia authors effective credit. It also prevents us from bringing in CC-BY-SA from third party sources which makes it further unacceptable. Yeah, that's about it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 6:20 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The attribution issue is so divisive, however, that I increasingly wonder whether it wouldn't be sensible to add at least a set of preferences to the licensing vote to better understand what people's preferred implementation would look like, within the scope of what we consider to be legally defensible parameters. If more than 10% or so of voters want direct attribution, it'll probably be enough of a critical mass to support a fork, licensed under the GFDL 1.2 only. I don't know if it's going to be that high or not, though. I look forward to you leading it. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:08 PM, geni geni...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: So why can't a fork be in compliance with the GFDL? You said that The GFDL 1.2 license is so bad that any fork would still be looking to use CC just in a slightly more legal way. What do you mean by this? What I mean is that if we consider the proposal to be legal under the CC license (I don't) then any fork would be better of using CC-BY-SA-3.0 without utilising the Attribution Parties bit of 4(C)(i). This means that it would get the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license without the downside that certain people appear to be trying to add. I also don't consider the proposal to be legal under the CC license, but I do think people will probably get away with it anyway. Additionally, I think whole concept of relicensing people's contributions under a different license is immoral and legally questionable. Thus, forking under GFDL 1.2 only has two distinct advantages: 1) it allows people who consider the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license to actually be detriments, to continue to contribute; and 2) it disallows Wikipedia from incorporating these changes, thus reducing the likelihood that third parties will come along and use these changes without attribution. I guess if you think the legal case is cut and dry those 10% could get together and initiate a class-action lawsuit, or something, but forking is probably easier and more effective. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth. This is a constructive and useful proposal, thank you. I agree with Milos when he states in another thread that we need to think further about a solution that is satisfactory to a greater number of people, at least when it comes to standardizing attribution requirements with effective application to all past edits ever made. (At minimum, I would like some more data to inform our decisions.) I also believe that the Wikimedia Foundation can responsibly and reasonably determine what attribution model it wants to apply going forward. For example, if WMF decides that a guaranteed by-name attribution is not reasonable, scalable, and detrimental to the goals of WMF, it can responsibly tell people that. People who have made past edits could be given the option to have _those_ edits always attributed by name. The community could gradually factor out those edits if it considers them to be cumbersome. This would cause some people to leave, but WMF could decide that causing some people to leave or fork is worth it in order to encourage greater re-use of content. It's similar to telling people that multimedia files for noncommercial use only are not welcome. Essentially, it would be a further refinement of the standards of freedom for the projects. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Thus, forking under GFDL 1.2 only has two distinct advantages: 1) it allows people who consider the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license to actually be detriments, to continue to contribute; and 2) it disallows Wikipedia from incorporating these changes, thus reducing the likelihood that third parties will come along and use these changes without attribution. 1) I would suggest that the number of people who care strongly about the particular license used and consider such a switch to be a detriment is small indeed. This isn't to say that this group should be ignored, only that they aren't going to represent a community with enough viability to sustain a project the size of Wikipedia. I guess if you think the legal case is cut and dry those 10% could get together and initiate a class-action lawsuit, or something, but forking is probably easier and more effective. Forking may certainly be easier, but it's hard for me to imagine that a fork of Wikipedia with 10% of it's population (and I posit that to be a high estimate) will be viable. A slogan of knowledge is free, but reusing it is more difficult because of our stringent attitudes towards attribution isn't going to inspire too many donors when fundraising time rolls around. Plus, Wikipedia's database (I assume you only want to fork Wikipedia, and maybe only the English one) is non-negligible and will cost money to have hosted. Fewer people will use the fork and it will grow more slowly, if it grows at all, because of licensing problems with content use and reuse. The fork will progressively become harder to use and will become more out of touch with the rest of the world of open content knowledge. You'll be able to say that at least if nobody is reusing your content that there is no chance they will be violating the attribution requirement as you've defined it. Given the option between two wikipedias, one that is large and easy to use/reuse/incorporate and one that is small and with a difficult licensing scheme, I think you can guess where the new contributors and new donation dollars will be heading. I don't want to threaten or mock here, but I also don't want to see anybody's valuable contributions be wasted. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: This is a constructive and useful proposal, thank you. I agree with Milos when he states in another thread that we need to think further about a solution that is satisfactory to a greater number of people, at least when it comes to standardizing attribution requirements with effective application to all past edits ever made. (At minimum, I would like some more data to inform our decisions.) I also believe that the Wikimedia Foundation can responsibly and reasonably determine what attribution model it wants to apply going forward. So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? For example, if WMF decides that a guaranteed by-name attribution is not reasonable, scalable, and detrimental to the goals of WMF, it can responsibly tell people that. It can however it would generally be expected that it provides a reason. A reason that is logically consistent with observed reality would probably be preferable. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
I understand Milos' concern, actually, and this is the most reasonable objection to a URL link for attribution purposes that has been raised so far. It is true that the Internet is by its nature impermanent, evolving both in content and in structure. It's by no means guaranteed that if we include http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistrycurid=8005action=history; in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019. On the other hand, if we printed out the names in the book... then as long as you have the book you have the names, because they travel together. We may change the syntax of the history link, the most common method for locating content on the web may change (either structurally, or because of device evolution), or the sites might for some reason come down. We should also consider that ideally we want our content to be usefully credited in areas of the world where Internet access is very limited, or where Wikipedia is specifically blocked. Thinking ahead, these are the parts of the world most likely to be using a paper Wikipedia anyway. I do understand that there are mediums where this is impossible, and I think perhaps the solution requires an outline that describes different (but reasonable) standards based on medium category, broadly interpreted. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? The fact that we don't seem to be able to agree on what is reasonable. (It would be nice if we could agree it between us rather than having to go to court over it...) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: That said, the GFDL requires authors to be listed in the section entitled History, and it clearly states that a section Entitled XYZ means a named subunit of the Document... So is current Wikipedia practice consistent with the GFDL or not? I believe that Wikipedia practice is not consistent with the GFDL. That's why I notified you that the WMF's right to use my content under the GFDL has been permanently revoked. Obviously, the History page reachable from a Wikipedia article could be interpreted as not being a section or a named subunit. On the other hand, the history page *could* be interpreted as being part of the Document. Historically, the community has generally interpreted this attribution requirement of the GFDL as allowing for a link to a History page. In this respect, there is no essential difference between GFDL and CC-BY- SA 3.x. For online copies, as I've said before, I don't see much problem with this. As I've said before, it's hard to draw the line as to what is part of the work and what is not part of the work, when it comes to online sources. But I don't think the same argument can be made for offline copies. If there is no essential difference, then your concern about getting credit is a wash, regardless of whether the license on Wikipedia is updated. My main concern is that CC-BY-SA will be deliberately misinterpreted to not require direct attribution - and the published draft of the RfC confirms that this concern is valid. This doesn't mean your concern is any less valid or invalid -- it just means that there's nothing inherent in the question of updating the license that should trigger it. The GFDL is much more clear on this issue. And some comments Erik has pointed us to from the CC lawyers make it clear that CC intends for CC-BY-SA to allow attribution by URL, so even if CC-BY-SA 3.0 isn't interpreted by the courts to allow this, CC-BY-SA 4.0 very well might. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? The fact that we don't seem to be able to agree on what is reasonable. (It would be nice if we could agree it between us rather than having to go to court over it...) Actually we have no idea if we are able to agree. Since we've only every looked at specific proposals rather than the general case for any given medium. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:51 PM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8...@gmail.comwrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: Thus, forking under GFDL 1.2 only has two distinct advantages: 1) it allows people who consider the benefits of the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license to actually be detriments, to continue to contribute; and 2) it disallows Wikipedia from incorporating these changes, thus reducing the likelihood that third parties will come along and use these changes without attribution. 1) I would suggest that the number of people who care strongly about the particular license used and consider such a switch to be a detriment is small indeed. This isn't to say that this group should be ignored, only that they aren't going to represent a community with enough viability to sustain a project the size of Wikipedia. Come to think of it, forking under GFDL 1.3 would probably be the most appropriate. Then, since Wikipedia intends to dual-license new content, new Wikipedia content could be incorporated into the fork, but new forked content couldn't be incorporated into Wikipedia. I guess if you think the legal case is cut and dry those 10% could get together and initiate a class-action lawsuit, or something, but forking is probably easier and more effective. Forking may certainly be easier, but it's hard for me to imagine that a fork of Wikipedia with 10% of it's population (and I posit that to be a high estimate) will be viable. A slogan of knowledge is free, but reusing it is more difficult because of our stringent attitudes towards attribution isn't going to inspire too many donors when fundraising time rolls around. A free encyclopedia without the plagiarism would be a better slogan, though I'm sure a little thought could produce an even better one. Plus, Wikipedia's database (I assume you only want to fork Wikipedia, and maybe only the English one) is non-negligible and will cost money to have hosted. Depends on the traffic. Pure hard drive space is relatively cheap. More traffic would lead to more expense, but it'd also likely lead to more donations. Fewer people will use the fork and it will grow more slowly, if it grows at all, because of licensing problems with content use and reuse. What licensing problems? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? The fact that we don't seem to be able to agree on what is reasonable. (It would be nice if we could agree it between us rather than having to go to court over it...) Therein lies the problem with using terms like reasonable in a legal document. It's a subjective term, and there are plenty of definitions that are going to work for some people and not others. Arguing over what is and what is not reasonable is a wasted exercise: The best we can do it put the issue to a vote and go with the opinion expressed by the voting majority. --Andrew Whitworth ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Anthony writes: On the other hand, the history page *could* be interpreted as being part of the Document. Even if it's on a different server? For online copies, as I've said before, I don't see much problem with this. As I've said before, it's hard to draw the line as to what is part of the work and what is not part of the work, when it comes to online sources. But I don't think the same argument can be made for offline copies. So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's an offline copy isn't? What is the legal distinction you're drawing here? (I ask for the legal distinction because you are articulating your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your legal rights.) My main concern is that CC-BY-SA will be deliberately misinterpreted to not require direct attribution - and the published draft of the RfC confirms that this concern is valid. So you think an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the article is online is direct? But an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the article is offline is *not* direct? What is the legal (or rights) basis for this distinction? --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? The fact that we don't seem to be able to agree on what is reasonable. I agree that at least the varied interpretations of 'reasonable' expressed in this thread indicate a need for a more explicit approach. Whether such different perceptions are as wide-spread in the broader author community as they are here is not clear. I will begin thinking about how a consultative survey could be constructed to help inform the process in a timely fashion. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: I'm afraid I simply don't understand what you're trying to say, then. It sounded like you were talking about having one document (web, print, whatever medium) point to another, something that might be done for attribution or a variety of other purposes. And if it's a question of pointing, I'm puzzled what difference it makes which medium is used or which direction one points across different media. I'm also not sure what you mean by a right to demand a printed legal document. It sounds sort of like you're referring to this as a right you hold as an author (whether as part of basic copyright or a moral right). That's not something I'm familiar with at all. So it's likely that I've not understood what you mean correctly there, either. No, I am referring to my right as a user of the content. (Implicitly, it is about my right as an author of the content, but, explicitly, it is not.) I'll try to be more formal in explaining: 1) There is a set of extended informations which I may get: * For example, I may ask for some kind of *howto* (note, not an official recommendations!) document about achieving my legal rights related to, let's say, building a house. * I also expect in a contemporary book about, let's say, astronomy, to refer to some documentation related to, let's say, some places on the Internet related to the grid computing. In both cases, strictly speaking, those are extra informations. In both cases it may be completely reasonable to have it in other form than a paper one. 2) But, there is a set of basic informations for which I have the right to get them in the appropriate form: * For example, legal documents about building a house. * List of authors of a written document which I am reading (if that document is not in public domain). In both cases, I expect that I get them in the most basic form. In both cases it is a paper form, not an electronic form. The right of a reader of a book has to be Send me the list of the authors [in the paper form]. (and, again, I think that you should know that better than me). If it is an explicit legal right (and I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be), then every publisher has the obligation to send the list of authors to every reader on demand. If it is not an explicit right, we should make a way how to fulfill this issue. A couple of months ago, I mentioned that it would be really useful to have periodicals (let's say, yearly), which would publish the list of the authors of the content of Wikimedia projects. This is not just about fulfilling the rights of readers or authors, but this is, also, a very relevant bibliographic work (maybe the most relevant) of the contemporary culture. In cooperation with relevant international institution those bibliographical informations may be available in all national and a lot of relevant libraries. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org wrote: Anthony writes: On the other hand, the history page *could* be interpreted as being part of the Document. Even if it's on a different server? I don't see why not. If you're talking about a different server and a different domain name, run by a different company, I think you could argue the difference is de minimis, so long as the other server is pretty much 100% accessible. For online copies, as I've said before, I don't see much problem with this. As I've said before, it's hard to draw the line as to what is part of the work and what is not part of the work, when it comes to online sources. But I don't think the same argument can be made for offline copies. So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's an offline copy isn't? Online when there's an offline copy clearly isn't okay. Online on a different server, run by a different company. I'm not going to say it's okay, but I really don't see much difference. What is the legal distinction you're drawing here? (I ask for the legal distinction because you are articulating your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your legal rights.) Actually, I'm purporting them to be violations of my moral rights. But the distinction is pretty obvious - in one case the page is a click away, in the other case it at least requires finding internet access and typing in a url, and quite possibly requires jumping through even more hoops than that. Additionally, printed copies will almost surely last longer than the url remains accessible. With online copies, the url can be updated if it moves, or the page can be copied to the local server if the remote one goes down. My main concern is that CC-BY-SA will be deliberately misinterpreted to not require direct attribution - and the published draft of the RfC confirms that this concern is valid. So you think an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the article is online is direct? I think it's close enough to direct that I'm not interested in complaining about it. Personally, I'd just include the attribution on the same server, especially if someone complained. But an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the article is offline is *not* direct? What is the legal (or rights) basis for this distinction? Common sense? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Andrew Whitworth wknight8...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:58 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? The fact that we don't seem to be able to agree on what is reasonable. (It would be nice if we could agree it between us rather than having to go to court over it...) Therein lies the problem with using terms like reasonable in a legal document. It's a subjective term, and there are plenty of definitions that are going to work for some people and not others. Arguing over what is and what is not reasonable is a wasted exercise: The best we can do it put the issue to a vote and go with the opinion expressed by the voting majority. That's the epitome of tyranny of the majority. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/21 geni geni...@gmail.com: So you are claiming that it is section 4(c)(iii) that makes your approach valid. First problem comes with the opening to section 4(c) You must ... keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: That is an and command not an or. You have to meet everything from 4(c)(i) to 4(c)(iv) Yes, and it's quite obvious that if no author name but a URL is supplied, then under 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii), a re-user would have to attribute only that URL. After all, the license clearly limits name attribution under 4(c)(i) with the clause if supplied. The 'reasonable' restriction in 4(c)(iii) is not particularly relevant to our intended use. Furthermore, the license has to be understood in the broader context of the terms of use under which people contribute; it allows for such terms exactly to define and clarify its attribution language. That's why the 'human readable' version of the license explicitly says that attribution must happen in the manner specified by the author or licensor, and even the CC website allows you to license a work with the only credit being a URL. This URL option is explained in the licensing help as 'The URL users of the work should link to. For example, the work's page on the author's site'. This is completely consistent with linking to an article or history page on Wikipedia. Your repeated assertion that attribution-by-URL is somehow inconsistent with CC-BY-SA is therefore obviously untrue. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org: 2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: 2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: So what exactly is the problem with requiring credit reasonable to the medium or means? The fact that we don't seem to be able to agree on what is reasonable. I agree that at least the varied interpretations of 'reasonable' expressed in this thread indicate a need for a more explicit approach. There is nothing you can do that will remove that from the crediting clause. Whatever you try to require there will always be a reasonable to the medium or means filter between you and the reuser. Trying to engineer around it would be unwise. Whether such different perceptions are as wide-spread in the broader author community as they are here is not clear. And unimportant. The license doesn't take into consideration what the authors consider reasonable to the medium or means. I will begin thinking about how a consultative survey could be constructed to help inform the process in a timely fashion. I would suggest that first you try and produce a halfway valid justification for the 5 name+url proposal before we waste time putting it out to a survey. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Milos Rancic wrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: I'm afraid I simply don't understand what you're trying to say, then. It sounded like you were talking about having one document (web, print, whatever medium) point to another, something that might be done for attribution or a variety of other purposes. And if it's a question of pointing, I'm puzzled what difference it makes which medium is used or which direction one points across different media. I'm also not sure what you mean by a right to demand a printed legal document. It sounds sort of like you're referring to this as a right you hold as an author (whether as part of basic copyright or a moral right). That's not something I'm familiar with at all. So it's likely that I've not understood what you mean correctly there, either. No, I am referring to my right as a user of the content. (Implicitly, it is about my right as an author of the content, but, explicitly, it is not.) In that case, I really don't know where you get the notion of a right to a printed legal document. If the user has been given a license, then the user has whatever rights are in that license. But neither the GFDL nor any of the Creative Commons licenses indicate that you have a right to be provided with a printed form. And in the context of copyright law more generally, there's nothing at all like this. The right of a reader of a book has to be Send me the list of the authors [in the paper form]. (and, again, I think that you should know that better than me). If it is an explicit legal right (and I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be), then every publisher has the obligation to send the list of authors to every reader on demand. It's an interesting concept, but simply doesn't exist anywhere that I know of. Perhaps you should suggest to those who want to have the identity of people editing from IP addresses exposed, that they push this idea as legislation. As it currently stands, I can publish something with no identifiable authors, no copyright notice, and no legal information whatsoever. Requirements like that (the US used to require a copyright notice) have been stripped away as an unreasonable burden on authors. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Anthony writes: Come to think of it, forking under GFDL 1.3 would probably be the most appropriate. Then, since Wikipedia intends to dual-license new content, new Wikipedia content could be incorporated into the fork, but new forked content couldn't be incorporated into Wikipedia. You haven't reviewed the FAQ. As Richard Stallman explains, CC-BY-SA- only changes, including imports from external sources, will bind Wikipedia and re-users of Wikipedia content. That said, I look forward to your fork. Why wait? Why don't you start now? You clearly are dissatisfied with Wikipedia's implementation of GFDL as well as Wikipedia's proposed use of CC-BY-SA. It should be easy, since you throw around the word fork so easily. You could probably squash us even more effectively than Citizendium and Knol have. (BTW, one benefit of the licensing proposal is that it will be easier for Wikipedia and Citizendium to cross-fertilize each other.) A free encyclopedia without the plagiarism would be a better slogan, though I'm sure a little thought could produce an even better one. You are a marketing genius. Depends on the traffic. Pure hard drive space is relatively cheap. More traffic would lead to more expense, but it'd also likely lead to more donations. You obviously have this all figured out. I can't wait to see your fork. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Thomas Dalton writes: So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's an offline copy isn't? What is the legal distinction you're drawing here? (I ask for the legal distinction because you are articulating your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your legal rights.) It all boils down to how you define reasonable, and that's usually left to laymen, not lawyers. If Anthony used the word reasonable in relation to this distinction, I missed it. In any case, it's not forbidden for lawyers to have intuitions about what is reasonable. In general, lawyers have the same prerogatives as laymen in this regard. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
2009/1/22 Florence Devouard anthe...@yahoo.com: 5. I see comments as well claiming that the operations of the French chapter do not benefit the projects. Please find here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Supported_by_Wikimedia_France the list of all pictures that could be added to Wikimedia Commons and our common pool of knowledge only THANKS to Wikimedia France (through funding of the amateur photographs travel to various famous event, or through the accreditations provided by Wikimedia France to access press areas in order to take good quality pictures). I love this idea - brilliant (both the funding of photographers, and the tracking through a dedicated category). -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Anthony writes: So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's an offline copy isn't? Online when there's an offline copy clearly isn't okay. Clearly because you have a legal right that distinguishes between online copies and offline copies? Please explain. (Once again, I'm asking about legal rights because you claim to be basing your objections on your rights.) What is the legal distinction you're drawing here? (I ask for the legal distinction because you are articulating your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your legal rights.) Actually, I'm purporting them to be violations of my moral rights. How are you distinguishing between moral rights and legal rights? A moral right is a kind of legal right, in those jurisdictions that recognize moral rights. But the distinction is pretty obvious - in one case the page is a click away, in the other case it at least requires finding internet access and typing in a url, and quite possibly requires jumping through even more hoops than that. So if you were unhappy that your attribution was at the back of a book, because a reader has to turn to the end and read through a lot of small print in order to find your name, that would give you a basis for objecting to that form of attribution? Additionally, printed copies will almost surely last longer than the url remains accessible. With online copies, the url can be updated if it moves, or the page can be copied to the local server if the remote one goes down. Thank you for articulating an advantage to using URLs. The advantage of course applies both to online and offline copies. But an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the article is offline is *not* direct? What is the legal (or rights) basis for this distinction? Common sense? So you're saying your legal rights are defined by common sense? Are you sure that's the direction in which you want to take your argument? --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Sam Johnston wrote: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: Das Wikipedia Lexikon in einem Band[1] is another stunning example of attribution gone mad A few pages of names in a 1000 page book doesn't seem that mad to me. I think it makes an excellent point about how Wikipedia works. Perhaps, but it delivers ZERO benefit to the pseudonymous individuals listed and exacts a non-trivial toll on the reuser. This is further amplified for partial reuse of a resource, reuse of multiple resources, reuse with tangible mediums (esp non-print e.g. t-shirts) and so on. While the toll can be reduced by automation it cannot be removed altogether and this does not change the fact that the result delivers ZERO value to anyone (authors, readers, reusers, the environment and Wikipedia as a whole). Sam And ??? So can you say about any attribution license and pretty much any free license. *I* have (co)written that article. I have given it for free, which I didn't need to. Now, *YOU* want to use *MY* article. Well, follow the terms or don't use it. If you're so concerned about not listing me, you can always ask me a commercial license for omitting it. It removes your requirement, and delivers greater than zero benefit to me. It may be enough for me to see my name on that page. What is unacceptable is to remove the attribution just because it delivers zero benefit, when it is the *ONLY* benefit I get. I might understand many reasons not to provide attribution. But this one is completely inadmissible. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Chad writes: I'm not the one to decide, nor do I have particularly strong feelings about one method of attribution or another. Just thought I'd lay the blame for this mess where it belongs: a vaguely worded license with highly debatable terms. Without defending the particulars of CC's phrasing, which I think has its problems but which I also think is better than you allow for here, I'll offer my opinion that a license a license without any vagueness or debatable terms is such a rarity that I don't think I've ever seen one. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Nathan wrote: I understand Milos' concern, actually, and this is the most reasonable objection to a URL link for attribution purposes that has been raised so far. It is true that the Internet is by its nature impermanent, evolving both in content and in structure. It's by no means guaranteed that if we include http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistrycurid=8005action=history; in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019. I'm familiar with that issue, of course, and respect those concerns. That doesn't sound like what Milos was getting at, though, as his subsequent comments seem to indicate. Anyway, our developers are quite conscious about ensuring that links to our pages from external sites work in a reliable manner. It's also been mentioned that people like how our meaningful URLs make it somewhat easier to predict where to find things. I imagine there's probably room for improvement still, but I think we do fairly well in this regard. At some point, if people really don't trust the internet for anything at all, they probably shouldn't be republishing thing they found there. Back to the question of attribution, as it relates to the medium. Milos made the observation about print as an older (less advanced) medium that shouldn't have to point to the newer (more advanced) medium. In reality, pointing across different media happens regularly, as has been mentioned. I also find it curious, for people to whom the difference in medium matters, that some of them would be pushing to impose more stringent attribution requirements on the older medium because of the imperfections of the newer one. Let's not punish print for the faults of the internet. You would almost think that some people are trying to ensure that their contributions can only ever be reused as online text, which is of course contrary to the purpose of free licensing. Nobody yet has found the perfect answer to cover all media forms, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to work out solutions. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Without defending the particulars of CC's phrasing, which I think has its problems but which I also think is better than you allow for here, I'll offer my opinion that a license a license without any vagueness or debatable terms is such a rarity that I don't think I've ever seen one. --Mike http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL is not far off. In any case vagueness has it's uses since any attempt to try and define everything will tend to result in the license either failing or behaving in a very unhelpful manner under certain conditions. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Chad writes: I'm not the one to decide, nor do I have particularly strong feelings about one method of attribution or another. Just thought I'd lay the blame for this mess where it belongs: a vaguely worded license with highly debatable terms. Without defending the particulars of CC's phrasing, which I think has its problems but which I also think is better than you allow for here, I'll offer my opinion that a license a license without any vagueness or debatable terms is such a rarity that I don't think I've ever seen one. It it did exist, it would be several volumes long. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Thomas Dalton wrote: 2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Chad writes: I'm not the one to decide, nor do I have particularly strong feelings about one method of attribution or another. Just thought I'd lay the blame for this mess where it belongs: a vaguely worded license with highly debatable terms. Without defending the particulars of CC's phrasing, which I think has its problems but which I also think is better than you allow for here, I'll offer my opinion that a license a license without any vagueness or debatable terms is such a rarity that I don't think I've ever seen one. It it did exist, it would be several volumes long. Not at all, length just introduces more room for ambiguity. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Thomas Dalton writes: So, online but on a different server is okay, but online when there's an offline copy isn't? What is the legal distinction you're drawing here? (I ask for the legal distinction because you are articulating your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your legal rights.) It all boils down to how you define reasonable, and that's usually left to laymen, not lawyers. If Anthony used the word reasonable in relation to this distinction, I missed it. In any case, it's not forbidden for lawyers to have intuitions about what is reasonable. In general, lawyers have the same prerogatives as laymen in this regard. The license uses the word reasonable and Anthony is talking about what is acceptable under the license. Of course, lawyers can have views on reasonableness, but they do so in their capacity as people, not lawyers. (There's a joke there, but I'm not going to stoop that low.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/22 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net: Thomas Dalton wrote: It it did exist, it would be several volumes long. Not at all, length just introduces more room for ambiguity. How do you deal with every possible situation in a way that makes sense without adding length? Unless you want to go for something extremely simple, in which case you'll probably find you're just releasing your work into the public domain. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
geni writes: (BTW, one benefit of the licensing proposal is that it will be easier for Wikipedia and Citizendium to cross-fertilize each other.) Nope. The to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors. bit will mean that it is imposable for wikipedia to take content from Citizendium without Citizendium adopting some very strange TOS specifically for the benefit of wikipedia which I would rather doubt it would do. Even that would not make it possible to copy content on Citizendium to wikipedia at the moment were the 5 names +URL proposal to be enacted. I don't regard the 5 names+URL implementation proposal to be written in stone. We might choose to modify it (by, e.g., increasing the number of names, or allowing editors who insist on being listed to be listed) based on feedback here and elsewhere. But the aspect of the license update has always been to maximize the extent to which Wikipedia can import and export CC-BY-SA-licensed content. Citizendium uses a CC-BY-SA 3.0 (unported) license already. Presumably Citizendium wants both to import and export CC-BY-SA content. Any implementation by us that would require us to ask Citizendium for some kind of exemption -- which I agree would be unlikely -- is out of the question. Note that I used the word easier, which is a comparative, rather than easy, which is an absolute. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
geni writes: In any case vagueness has it's uses since any attempt to try and define everything will tend to result in the license either failing or behaving in a very unhelpful manner under certain conditions. I like to think Kurt Gödel had some important observations in this regard. One of the things I see as a lawyer and as a student in philosophy is the attempt in the GFDL to cover every possible use case with specificity -- this effort is not wholly incomparable to the effort to explain all of mathematics in terms of logic and set theory. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: It's by no means guaranteed that if we include http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistrycurid=8005action=history in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019. You're right, which is another great reason *not* to link to the history page URLs (which are as ugly as sin) but to the article directly (which is *significantly* more useful for the reusers' users). While I find it very hard to believe Wikipedia will cease to exist, the same can't necessarily be said for PHP and ugly GET requests are already a dying breed... If we do eventually find a sensible way to identify primary authors then we can always promote them to the article page, or a separate info/credits page (which could include other metadata like creation date, edit and editor counts, etc.). On the other hand if we *must* have a separate link then perhaps appending '/info', '/credit' or similar to the article URL would be a better choice. Alternatively we could set up something like a purl partial redirect or even run our own short link service (eg http://wikipedia.org/x9fd) which would reliably point at a specific version and survive moves etc. There are plenty of solutions - we just need to work out which one works best and offends the least people. Sam On the other hand, if we printed out the names in the book... then as long as you have the book you have the names, because they travel together. We may change the syntax of the history link, the most common method for locating content on the web may change (either structurally, or because of device evolution), or the sites might for some reason come down. We should also consider that ideally we want our content to be usefully credited in areas of the world where Internet access is very limited, or where Wikipedia is specifically blocked. Thinking ahead, these are the parts of the world most likely to be using a paper Wikipedia anyway. I do understand that there are mediums where this is impossible, and I think perhaps the solution requires an outline that describes different (but reasonable) standards based on medium category, broadly interpreted. Nathan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Erik Moeller wrote: 2009/1/21 Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.yu: I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. For example, everyone who believes that an URL should be fine is also OK if all names are given, but not the other way around. That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served. It's true that this is not the case for a large number of articles, but it's often the case for the most interesting ones. The proposed attribution language - to state names when there are fewer than six - is precisely written as a compromise. According to your own metrics, for very many articles, this would mean that all authors would be named. And the filtering of author names could be continually improved to exclude irrelevant names. I would say that it's true that the people who have made the case against heavy attribution requirements have been typically more willing to accept compromise. What compromise are you willing to accept? Saying that 'you can opt out' does not address the concerns of the other side. Opt-in permanent attribution would be an alternative that would probably not have huge impact, and it could be offered only on a retroactive basis (e.g. for past edits, but not for future ones). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/1/22 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: It all boils down to how you define reasonable, and that's usually left to laymen, not lawyers. Which is why I for one say shame on CC for using such crappy phrasing. Essentially they're saying require attribution, but what form that attribution comes in is what author(s) deem to be reasonable. It's what a jury deems reasonable, rather than the author(s), isn't it? The author(s) set the terms. If it ends up in court, it would be the judge/jury who decides if the author(s)' idea of 'reasonable' is in fact reasonable. Of course, this all depends on the court's idea of 'reasonable' too, so we're back to the same issue :) -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Erik Moeller wrote: For example, if WMF decides that a guaranteed by-name attribution is not reasonable, scalable, and detrimental to the goals of WMF, it can responsibly tell people that. People who have made past edits could be given the option to have _those_ edits always attributed by name. The community could gradually factor out those edits if it considers them to be cumbersome. Let me just humbly ask you. Would it be detrimental to the goals of the WMF, if people re-using WMF content could do so in a way that would make the content impossible to use in any jurisdiction where moral rights obtain? I ask only in a search for clarity on this issue. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Erik Moeller wrote: Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records. The notion that it's actually useful to anyone in that list is dubious at best. A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia. I think requiring this for, e.g., a wiki-reader on countries makes it significantly less likely for people to create such products, Not that creating a wiki-reader of countries is easier either. Although if they are using WMF articles dumps they'll have more problems because they don't include attribution. So the problem is basically collecting the authors. If they were incorporated (eg. bug 16082) showing the list is even easier than the content itself. The idea that we can meaningfully define the number of cases where this requirement is onerous and the number where it isn't through simple language is not at all obvious to me. Whether something is onerous is in part a function of someone's willingness and ability to invest effort, not whether they are creating something that's intended for online and offline use. We can at least document what we consider not onerous (ie. lazyness on part of the reuser not to do). I think we can advance much more on that path (and maybe then generalise). One of such statements could be A DVD release shouldn't include just a url to the history. Anyone here doesn't find it reasonable? Yes, there will be borderline cases, but most of them can be grouped together. If people find that is onerous we should also work on making the task easier for them (eg. adding an Authors tab as proposed). For instance, it once was hard to get the contributors list. Now there're several tools to do it. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: allowing editors who insist on being listed to be listed I think unless that is opt-out, not opt-in, it won't help and if it's opt-out if probably won't make things much easier. Why? If we assert a default sense of the community that the URL is reasonable, and allow individual authors to override that (and consequently annoy readers and redistributors in the future) how does that negatively affect any author's rights or property? -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Mike Godwin wrote: geni writes: In any case vagueness has it's uses since any attempt to try and define everything will tend to result in the license either failing or behaving in a very unhelpful manner under certain conditions. I like to think Kurt Gödel had some important observations in this regard. One of the things I see as a lawyer and as a student in philosophy is the attempt in the GFDL to cover every possible use case with specificity -- this effort is not wholly incomparable to the effort to explain all of mathematics in terms of logic and set theory. --Mike You Are Nicholas Bourbaki, And I Claim My Five Pounds. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/23 George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: allowing editors who insist on being listed to be listed I think unless that is opt-out, not opt-in, it won't help and if it's opt-out if probably won't make things much easier. Why? If we assert a default sense of the community that the URL is reasonable, and allow individual authors to override that (and consequently annoy readers and redistributors in the future) how does that negatively affect any author's rights or property? Either it's reasonable, or it's not. If you feel the need to give people the option of opting out, then obviously you think it isn't reasonable. Also, why should people that have edited in the past and then moved on not get the same rights as current editors? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Re-licensing (Import)
Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:58:31 -0800 From: Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 55aa3395-ec88-4ec2-8d36-efda1967a...@wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes geni writes: (BTW, one benefit of the licensing proposal is that it will be easier for Wikipedia and Citizendium to cross-fertilize each other.) Nope. The to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors. bit will mean that it is imposable for wikipedia to take content from Citizendium without Citizendium adopting some very strange TOS specifically for the benefit of wikipedia which I would rather doubt it would do. Even that would not make it possible to copy content on Citizendium to wikipedia at the moment were the 5 names +URL proposal to be enacted. I don't regard the 5 names+URL implementation proposal to be written in stone. We might choose to modify it (by, e.g., increasing the number of names, or allowing editors who insist on being listed to be listed) based on feedback here and elsewhere. But the aspect of the license update has always been to maximize the extent to which Wikipedia can import and export CC-BY-SA-licensed content. Citizendium uses a CC-BY-SA 3.0 (unported) license already. Presumably Citizendium wants both to import and export CC-BY-SA content. Any implementation by us that would require us to ask Citizendium for some kind of exemption -- which I agree would be unlikely -- is out of the question. May I repeat: It is the right of the author and only of the author to choose the way the attribution is made according the CC-BY-SA license. You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or (ii) if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g. a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution (Attribution Parties) in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; the title of the Work if supplied; to the extent reasonably practicable, the Uniform Resource Identifier, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and, consistent with Section 3(b) in the case of a Derivative Work, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Derivative Work (e.g., French translation of the Work by Original Author, or Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author). The credit required by this Section 4(c) may be implemented in any reasonable manner The original Author/Licensor has to designate an attribution party and to specify an URI as attribution. His decision has to be respected by Wikipedia absolutely. This means: If Wikipedia wants to import standard CC-BY-SA content with the name of the author as attribution scheme it is NOT possible to apply the 5 authors rule for this content. Author's name has to be mentioned even if 1000 other contributors work on the Wikipedia article - not for eternity but 70 years after his death. In this case re-users cannot choose the link-to-a-name-list-rule. If such imported authors have special conditions - why not give them to all Wikipedia contributors? Klaus Graf ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:24 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/1/23 George Herbert george.herb...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: allowing editors who insist on being listed to be listed I think unless that is opt-out, not opt-in, it won't help and if it's opt-out if probably won't make things much easier. Why? If we assert a default sense of the community that the URL is reasonable, and allow individual authors to override that (and consequently annoy readers and redistributors in the future) how does that negatively affect any author's rights or property? Either it's reasonable, or it's not. If you feel the need to give people the option of opting out, then obviously you think it isn't reasonable. Also, why should people that have edited in the past and then moved on not get the same rights as current editors? No, I think it is reasonable. If I were the License Czar we'd just do that and be done with it. But this is a community, with some people with aggressively diverse opinions. Imposing from above without flexibility causes pain and suffering and hurt feelings and people leaving the project and firey poo-flinging monkeys on UFOs to descend from the heavens. I think that overall, we have to do something like the proposed CC-BY-SA-3.0 details to balance author, reader, project, and content reuser interests, and I believe that that's ultimately not negotiable. Optimizing the implementation of BY so that people who agree that GFDL - CC is good but who disagree on the BY credit-by-web approach can still stay included, while still balancing reader and project and content reuser needs with author needs, is a good thing. A default to the reasonable approach, with exception allowed for objectors, works fine for that. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com: If we assert a default sense of the community that the URL is reasonable, and allow individual authors to override that (and consequently annoy readers and redistributors in the future) how does that negatively affect any author's rights or property? Either it's reasonable, or it's not. If you feel the need to give people the option of opting out, then obviously you think it isn't reasonable. Also, why should people that have edited in the past and then moved on not get the same rights as current editors? Essentially, by doing this, you'd be saying: We disagree with you, but we're not interested in engaging in a prolonged battle over perceived author rights in a massively collaborative work with you. So if you really have a beef with our attribution model, which is the result of many months of deliberation and consultation, you can use this setting to be attributed in a way for your past edits that's consistent with your perception and beliefs about what rights you have retained under the terms of use in the past. However, we think that the notion that print-outs of massively collaborative works should carry author attribution over multiple pages, that spoken versions should contain many seconds of text-to-speech generated author lists, that indeed any re-user will have to worry about this problem, is completely counter to the principles of free culture. So, for your past edits, please click this button. We will always attribute you by name as long as we use your text, and we will probably remove your edits over time. For your future edits, we've made it abundantly clear that this isn't something we believe is required or needed. If you think it is, please contribute somewhere else. It would be, IMO, a completely defensible way to deal with a situation where a minority is trying to impose standards on an entire community which are counter to its objectives. I'm not necessarily saying that this reflects the situation we have today: I don't know how widespread the belief in the need for distribution of excessive author metadata is. I think it would be worth the effort to find out. It's my personal belief that such metadata requirements are harmful examples of non-free licensing terms, and I would be surprised to see many people defend excessive attribution as in the http://books.google.com/books?id=BaWKVqiUH-4Cpg=PT979#PPT959,M1 example (even if it's aesthetically well done and obviously pleasing to lots of German mothers). The above solution would still result in the odd situation where the article on [[France]] would say: 'See (url) for a list of authors, including Foo and Bar'. But that is a problem that could be solved over time by removing those people's contributions. It seems to me that, essentially, some people have been operating under the assumption that they are contributing in a fashion that would make the resulting work effectively non-free in much the same way other onerous restrictions do. It's too bad that they've made that assumption, given how strongly and clearly we've always emphasized the principles of freedom. I think it would be fully ethically and legally defensible to ignore this assumption as incorrect and unreasonable, but it would be nicer (and possibly less noisy) to accommodate these people as much as reasonably possible while explaining that the 'free' in 'free encyclopedia' is inconsistent with hassling re-users about the inclusion of kilobytes worth of largely meaningless author metadata. I'm not advocating one path over another at this point, though. Flexible and vague clauses can work well when you're dealing with issues with few stakeholders who all have a shared and tacit understanding of what they want to accomplish. By definition, massive collaboration isn't such a situation: any one of hundreds or thousands of contributors to a document can behave unreasonably, interpreting rules to the detriment of others. The distributed ownership of copyright to a single work is an example of what Michael Heller calls 'gridlock' or an 'anticommons'. Ironically, even with free content licenses, the gridlock effects of copyright can still come into play. I believe it's our obligation to give our reusers protection from being hassled by people insisting on heavy attribution requirements, and to create consistency in reuse guidelines. Really, WMF and its chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we can't give clarity on what's required of them. A great deal of free information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is free to be reused without onerous restrictions. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
Re: [Foundation-l] Survey wrap-up
2009/1/22 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: It is now 11 weeks later. Any idea when we might see the survey results released? I've sent the survey team a first set of priority questions for analysis. I haven't received an ETA yet, but I will report results as soon as they become available, and I hope it's a matter of weeks, not months, at this point. This will not yet be the full in-depth analysis, which will probably take until March/April. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing (Import)
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 2:06 AM, Klaus Graf klausg...@googlemail.comwrote: His decision has to be respected by Wikipedia absolutely. And it will be... in the edit summary for the import which is in turn referenced either directly or indirectly in the attribution. The critical difference is that unlike your average Wikipedian, this author didn't deliberately and knowingly contribute to a collaborative effort and in doing so waive any real possibility of a meaningful attribution. So what's the better evil? Dealing with this once on the way in (that is, pinging the original author regarding your intention to include their content in a wiki where it will be relentlessly edited and reused with diluted attribution) or externalising the effort for all of our [re]users (and their [re]users and so on) forever by 'polluting' the article with a myriad differing long-lived attribution demands? Note that Citizendium have been doing something like what is proposed for ages (you must attribute the *Citizendium* and link to http://www.citizendium.org/ as well as the relevant *Citizendium* article), *including* for Wikipedia articles (Some content on this page may previously have [appeared on Wikipedia]). The sky hasn't fallen on them yet. Sam 1. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Reusing_Citizendium_Content ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Survey wrap-up
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/1/22 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: It is now 11 weeks later. Any idea when we might see the survey results released? I've sent the survey team a first set of priority questions for analysis. I haven't received an ETA yet, but I will report results as soon as they become available, and I hope it's a matter of weeks, not months, at this point. This will not yet be the full in-depth analysis, which will probably take until March/April. This still feels like an awful long time. I understand the desire to do synthesis and interpretation, but is there some reason why basic summary data can't be released much faster than 3+ months? For example, the number of people choosing each option on each question. While there is value in picking apart subgroups and performing regressions (especially when you have such a huge sample size!), many of us aren't even sure what the first-order patterns will look like so it would be nice to see some data released. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/23 Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org:
E our attribution model, which is the
result of many months of deliberation and consultation,
Evidences?
However, we think that the notion that print-outs of massively
collaborative works should carry author attribution over multiple
pages, that spoken versions should contain many seconds of
text-to-speech generated author lists, that indeed any re-user will
have to worry about this problem, is completely counter to the
principles of free culture.
{{fact}}
So, for your past edits, please click this
button. We will always attribute you by name as long as we use your
text, and we will probably remove your edits over time.
Questionable. For example the heavily edited [[Siege]] has text that
is recognizably mine from 2004.
It would be, IMO, a completely defensible way to deal with a situation
where a minority is trying to impose standards on an entire community
which are counter to its objectives. I'm not necessarily saying that
this reflects the situation we have today: I don't know how widespread
the belief in the need for distribution of excessive author metadata
is. I think it would be worth the effort to find out. It's my personal
belief that such metadata requirements are harmful examples of
non-free licensing terms, and I would be surprised to see many people
defend excessive attribution as in the
http://books.google.com/books?id=BaWKVqiUH-4Cpg=PT979#PPT959,M1
example (even if it's aesthetically well done and obviously pleasing
to lots of German mothers).
Err your proposed solution wouldn't greatly change the situation there
since it could require up to a quarter of a million credits and about
50,000 urls. Since most wikipedia nics are rather shorter than URLs I
find it questionable that that would count as an improvement.
Hmm it has pics as well attaching urls to the pics instead of author
nics actively makes things worse.
The above solution would still result in the odd situation where the
article on [[France]] would say: 'See (url) for a list of authors,
including Foo and Bar'. But that is a problem that could be solved
over time by removing those people's contributions. It seems to me
that, essentially, some people have been operating under the
assumption that they are contributing in a fashion that would make the
resulting work effectively non-free in much the same way other onerous
restrictions do. It's too bad that they've made that assumption, given
how strongly and clearly we've always emphasized the principles of
freedom.
The phrase Reasonable to the medium or means in the CC license
pretty much makes what you suggest impossible using credits. If you
want to do that copyright notices are a far better attack line.
Flexible and vague clauses can work well when you're dealing with
issues with few stakeholders who all have a shared and tacit
understanding of what they want to accomplish. By definition, massive
collaboration isn't such a situation: any one of hundreds or thousands
of contributors to a document can behave unreasonably, interpreting
rules to the detriment of others. The distributed ownership of
copyright to a single work is an example of what Michael Heller calls
'gridlock' or an 'anticommons'. Ironically, even with free content
licenses, the gridlock effects of copyright can still come into play.
If you think CC licenses don't have large flexible and vague areas you
haven't read them or have a poor understanding of international IP
law.
I believe it's our obligation to give our reusers protection from
being hassled by people insisting on heavy attribution requirements,
and to create consistency in reuse guidelines.
Those two directly contradict.
Really, WMF and its
chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we
can't give clarity on what's required of them.
You cannot give clarity for them whatever you do. You are not a
government. The cost however of your attempt would be that wikipedia
is unable to be a reuser.
A great deal of free
information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty
and doubt.
may. So speculation.
I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is
free to be reused without onerous restrictions.
You might want to but there is no way you can actually do it. There is
very little caselaw when it comes to free licenses (heh we can't even
show that CC licenses are something that can be meaningfully agreed to
in say France).
--
geni
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Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
What is the legal distinction you're drawing here? (I ask for the legal distinction because you are articulating your concern in terms of what you purport to be violations of your legal rights.) Actually, I'm purporting them to be violations of my moral rights. How are you distinguishing between moral rights and legal rights? A legal right is recognized by law. A moral right may not be. A moral right is a kind of legal right, in those jurisdictions that recognize moral rights. Sure, but I'm not in a jurisdiction that indisputably recognizes the right to attribution. But the distinction is pretty obvious - in one case the page is a click away, in the other case it at least requires finding internet access and typing in a url, and quite possibly requires jumping through even more hoops than that. So if you were unhappy that your attribution was at the back of a book, because a reader has to turn to the end and read through a lot of small print in order to find your name, that would give you a basis for objecting to that form of attribution? Barring a license to use my content in that way, sure. Just like a film director has a basis to demand the last solo credit card before the first scene of the picture. But an online attribution on a separate page (or server) when the article is offline is *not* direct? What is the legal (or rights) basis for this distinction? Common sense? So you're saying your legal rights are defined by common sense? To some extent, sure. Not entirely by common sense, of course, but legal rights can't be understood without employing common sense. Are you sure that's the direction in which you want to take your argument? I'm sure you'll take my comment out of context in any case. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/1/22 Mike Godwin mgod...@wikimedia.org: Anthony writes: Come to think of it, forking under GFDL 1.3 would probably be the most appropriate. Then, since Wikipedia intends to dual-license new content, new Wikipedia content could be incorporated into the fork, but new forked content couldn't be incorporated into Wikipedia. You haven't reviewed the FAQ. As Richard Stallman explains, CC-BY-SA- only changes, including imports from external sources, will bind Wikipedia and re-users of Wikipedia content. I think it's obvious Anthony means almost all new Wikipedia content - CC-BY-SA only edits obviously can't be used under GFDL, do you really think Anthony's that stupid or are you just taking every opportunity you can to resort to (somewhat subtle, I'll grant you) ad hominem attacks because you know you're talking nonsense? Thanks. By new Wikipedia content I meant content first contributed to Wikipedia. To answer Mike's other comment, about why I don't fork now. 1) I never said I was the one who was going to do the fork, I only said a 10% level would likely be enough of a critical mass to pull it off; and 2) I don't think the WMF has managed yet to piss off enough people to make a fork viable. *IF* more than 10% or so of voters want direct attribution, and *IF* the WMF goes ahead and tells reusers that attribution by URL is acceptable, *THEN* I think a fork would be viable. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Anthony writes: A legal right is recognized by law. A moral right may not be. This must be your own idiosyncratic application of the term moral right. In copyright, moral rights refers to inalienable legal rights that are recognized in law. If you are in a jurisdiction that does not recognize moral rights, then you don't have them, by definition. Sure, but I'm not in a jurisdiction that indisputably recognizes the right to attribution. Okay, so why are you invoking rights that you don't have? Barring a license to use my content in that way, sure. Just like a film director has a basis to demand the last solo credit card before the first scene of the picture. Excuse me? Film directors don't have any legal right to such a credit card (I assume you mean credit). They may negotiate for such a credit through contract, but they don't have it in the absence of a contract. So you're saying your legal rights are defined by common sense? To some extent, sure. Not entirely by common sense, of course, but legal rights can't be understood without employing common sense. They can't be understood without knowledge of the law, either. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
Anthony writes: A legal right is recognized by law. A moral right may not be. This must be your own idiosyncratic application of the term moral right. In copyright, moral rights refers to inalienable legal rights that are recognized in law. If you are in a jurisdiction that does not recognize moral rights, then you don't have them, by definition. Sure, but I'm not in a jurisdiction that indisputably recognizes the right to attribution. Okay, so why are you invoking rights that you don't have? Barring a license to use my content in that way, sure. Just like a film director has a basis to demand the last solo credit card before the first scene of the picture. Excuse me? Film directors don't have any legal right to such a credit card (I assume you mean credit). They may negotiate for such a credit through contract, but they don't have it in the absence of a contract. So you're saying your legal rights are defined by common sense? To some extent, sure. Not entirely by common sense, of course, but legal rights can't be understood without employing common sense. They can't be understood without knowledge of the law, either. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
2009/1/22 geni geni...@gmail.com: Err your proposed solution wouldn't greatly change the situation there since it could require up to a quarter of a million credits and about 50,000 urls. Since most wikipedia nics are rather shorter than URLs I find it questionable that that would count as an improvement. A single URL could point to a list of all contributors for all articles. I agree that under the proposed principles of attribution, a lot of individual names would still have to be included, though probably far fewer than right now. (They could actually be more visibly included as 'credit: foo, bar' under the articles, which IMO underscores that the proposed regime, where direct credit is given, encourages it to be more visible and significant.) One of the interesting things about the German book is that it's a collection of many thousands of tiny article summaries, which still triggers the worst of any attribution regime that requires direct name attribution. I do agree with you, Mike and others who have pointed out that we want to retain flexibility in application. I'm not arguing for absolutely rigid attribution requirements, and to the extent that the current proposal suggests that, it should be revised. I am, however, arguing for articulating principles and demonstrating them through guidelines and examples, so that there's no ambiguity about our general understanding of what we mean with reasonable applications. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/1/22 Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com: On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 4:25 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: It all boils down to how you define reasonable, and that's usually left to laymen, not lawyers. Which is why I for one say shame on CC for using such crappy phrasing. Essentially they're saying require attribution, but what form that attribution comes in is what author(s) deem to be reasonable. It's what a jury deems reasonable, rather than the author(s), isn't it? Isn't it what a jury deems the grantee of the license to have intended? You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), [...] provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution (Attribution Parties) in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties. Now, personally, the way I read reasonable to the medium or means You are utilitzing, I think it means what is reasonably necessary to provide proper attribution, not what is reasonably necessary to maximize reuse. Erik seems to be pushing for the latter interpretation. On the other hand, I think it's a terrible idea to use such an ambiguous license in the first place. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Anthony writes: A legal right is recognized by law. A moral right may not be. This must be your own idiosyncratic application of the term moral right. In copyright, moral rights refers to inalienable legal rights that are recognized in law. If you are in a jurisdiction that does not recognize moral rights, then you don't have them, by definition. In ethics, A moral right is a morally justified claim. A legal right is a legally justified claim. When one uses the term right without specifying the nature of the justification, one usually means a moral right. ( http://www.onlineethics.org/CMS/glossary.aspx?letter=R) Confusing, perhaps, since the term moral rights (almost always plural) has another definition in copyright law. Barring a license to use my content in that way, sure. Just like a film director has a basis to demand the last solo credit card before the first scene of the picture. Excuse me? Film directors don't have any legal right to such a credit card (I assume you mean credit). They may negotiate for such a credit through contract, but they don't have it in the absence of a contract. In the absence of a contract, there wouldn't be a film. And no, I mean credit card, as in a type of title card. It's film jargon, derived no doubt by the fact that they used to be printed on cards. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
Anthony wrote: Now, personally, the way I read reasonable to the medium or means You are utilitzing, I think it means what is reasonably necessary to provide proper attribution, not what is reasonably necessary to maximize reuse. Erik seems to be pushing for the latter interpretation. Without stipulating that that is what Erik really wants, I will just say that I fear what he has been so far proposing, in the absolute will not accomplish that end. Instead it can completely prevent some reuse of material derived from wikipedia. That is prevent reuse of reused wikipedia material, breaking the viral nature of the inherent copyleft; in those jurisdictions where moral rights are inalienable. At least that is my understanding. I of course Am Not a Lawyer. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Re-licensing
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Anthony writes: Sure, but I'm not in a jurisdiction that indisputably recognizes the right to attribution. Okay, so why are you invoking rights that you don't have? Please read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights_(copyright_law), and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rights Just because a right isn't recognized, does not mean that I do not have it. Sometimes I wonder whether you're being intentionally obtuse. How in the world could a lawyer familiar with constitutional law not know that? Seriously, that's appalling. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Commons and The Year of the Picture
Did actually anybody ever considered paying some part of the profit to the authors of the pictures? Or at least, if this is such a tiny amount that it would not make sense, placing some acknowledgements at their pages? I am sorry to say, now I see quite an opposite attitude: You have put a picture under a free licence, now do not complain. This is fine of course but does not encourage the authors very much. Cheers Yaroslav ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
