Ben McIlwain ("Cyde Weys") wrote:
And as for NPOV articles ... if someone is being paid to write articles
on these businesses, it isn't going to be NPOV, but it's going to be POV
in a way that you could only establish it as such if you were intimately
familiar with the subject matter, or were prepared to do lots of
research. That's why we have the general prohibition against publicity
articles; they tend not to be NPOV, and even when they do appear to be,
they likely aren't.
Ben, I just got off the phone with a potential client. They have this
awesome promotional idea that is going to BLOW AWAY all of their previous
marketing efforts, including their 2004 Super Bowl ad campaign. This is the
campaign to end all publicity campaigns. It's no wonder nobody's ever
thought of it before, because it is pure genius. Here's their plan...
They're going to have MyWikiBiz cook up this amazingly scripted article in
Wikipedia. Every word is going to be spelled correctly, and all the Wiki
syntax is going to be ship-shape. It's going to include some incredible
information that is sure to mesmerize consumers across the face of the
Earth. We're talking stuff like IDENTIFYING THE CEO of the company, and
maybe even LISTING THE CHAIRMAN's name. Not only that, but MyWikiBiz will
cite the YEAR THE COMPANY WAS FOUNDED. Wait, there's more -- the types of
products that the company sells will be LISTED FOR ALL TO SEE, with internal
Wikipedia links to those classes of products. Still with me? Just as
buyers are falling out of their seats to scramble to this company's
headquarters to try to execute a leveraged buyout, we will dumbfound them
all, by LISTING THE COMPANY'S STOCK TICKER SYMBOL. Oh. My. God. There will
be a bull market frenzy that will put the dot-com bubble to shame, all
thanks to Wikipedia.
Try not to break down in a fit of consumer ECSTASY, when I reveal the coup
de grace... That's right, we'll finish it all off with an EXTERNAL LINK to
the company's HOMEPAGE.
Somebody shut us down, before we can carry out this master plan of
marketing.
And somebody speedy delete the article on Coca-Cola, too. There's a line in
there about "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing" as being "widely
considered one of the best advertising campaigns in history" -- with no
reference cited.
-- Gregory Kohs
--
Gregory Kohs
Office: 484.840.4369
Home: 610.696.1644
Cell: 302.463.1354
> > > Consider what happens if we make a print version of Wikipedia with
> > > color images in black and white? Is that a derived work?
> >
> > Meh. Possibly a derivative work under some laws, I don't know.
> >
> > Though CC-BY-ND, for instance, explicitly allows transfer to different
> media,
> > and modifications necessary for such.
>
> CC-By-ND leaves a lot of things unanswered.. not as vague as NC, but
> it's still ugly.
>
> You didn't comment on my other examples. :)
Same answer, no? Sorry, I'm still not seeing the "downstream" argument. CC
licenses are meant to be valid for absolutely all media formats, including those
not yet conceived of, and even ND licenses make allowances for this. If a
downstream user really did have to make a modification to make it available in
some media format, then it would be explicitly allowed by CC-(*)-ND. The
"cropping for fair use" is not needed because we wouldn't have to rely on fair use.
> I think you misunderstand how fair use is supposed to be used on
> enwiki because it is so widely misused.
Quite possibly!
> See [[WP:FUC]].
I had seen FUC, and that was why I brought up fair use. I figured, if we allow
that stuff under these conditions, then surely a free license like CC-BY-ND
wouldn't be horrible, even if it is more restrictive than CC-BY-SA. CC-BY-NC-SA
is out, but I figured that was for downstream reasons.
> we do not want to make the impression that we are
> using the work under CC-BY-ND, that we approve of the license, or that
> we would encourage anyone to release content under it.
Well, this is a bit of a surprise. So, it's not just a legal issue for us and
our downstream users.
>
> > You then go down just a bit further to find what "free license" is
> acceptable.
> > Again, it explicitly forbids non-commercial use licenses, but is silent on
> > non-derivative licenses. You then go to another page for "acceptable image
> tags"
> > (WP:TAG).
>
> I'll fix that so it doesn't create any impression of being a complete list.
>
Well, if it is a fairly common case, then maybe it actually needs explaning and
justifying, like for NC. I'd like to say it's not an obvious point at all, but
maybe this is only because I like to think of myself as not being dense.
Seriously, am I the first one to bring ND up? If so, there's probably no point
adding rules for a rare or even hypothetical case. If not, is there a pointer to
discussion somewhere?
Cheers,
Daniel
With some trepidation, I notify the WikiEN-l list about this blog post. I
do so in the interest of some interesting Wikipedia analysis, and fair play
(feel free to rip me a new one in the blog's Comments section). Here is the
blog post:
http://mywikibiz-com.blogspot.com/2006/09/gaping-void-in-wikipedia.html
Kindly,
Gregory Kohs
> From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner(a)gmail.com>
>
> Obviously [[WP:V]] and (to a lesser extent) [[WP:RS]] are absolutely
> vital policies that cannot be discarded. On the other hand, in their
> current form they are abominations that fundamentally undermine key
> aspects of Wikipedia's mission.
I'd like to thank Phil for his unusually thoughtful posting.
I'm not sure that I agree with all of it, but there is one point
that I want to emphasise.
> 1) They actively encourage removal of material that is accurate
>
> Admittedly, our standard for inclusion is "verifiability, not truth."
> We ought not, however, fall into the trap of deciding that we are
> therefore against truth. Our goal is to offer the sum total of human
> knowledge. If information is true and significant, we ought be trying
> to find a way to get it in.
Hear! Hear! The problem with the current policy, starting with that
appalling slogan "verifiability, not truth" is that it presents
verifiability
and truth as alternatives. What on Earth are we doing here if we don't
care whether our articles are true or not? (Before you tell me that we
do care, please find a statement to that effect on [[WP:V]].) Why
can't
we have verifiability AND truth?
What the policy should say FIRST (in my humble opinion) is that we
at Wikipedia would love to have the most accurate and complete
encyclopedia in the galaxy. That's the AIM. Then it should say,
SECOND, that the task of approaching that aim is constrained
by the proven need to avoid certain serious problems (personal
research, material from dubious or unknown sources, etc) and
therefore we have established policies on which sources of
information can be cited, and guidelines on ranking of sources.
Then those policies and guidelines can be explained.
I suggest that rewriting the policy in this fashion would avoid the
impression that in order to embrace verifiability we rejected truth.
Zero.
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> Consider what happens if we make a print version of Wikipedia with
> color images in black and white? Is that a derived work?
Meh. Possibly a derivative work under some laws, I don't know.
Though CC-BY-ND, for instance, explicitly allows transfer to different media,
and modifications necessary for such.
> > For starters it isn't mentioned in the copyright FAQ at all.
> [snip]
>
> The copyright FAQ is mostly written for users of content in Wikipedia.
> Not creators of Wikipedia content.
Sorry, isn't that the case under discussion? By "user of content" we mean people
including someone else's content in Wikipedia, rather than people using
Wikipedia's content, right? Because the first question in the FAQ is, in fact,
"Can I add to Wikipedia something that I got from somewhere else?"
The FAQ has a whole section on licenses. It even has a specific sub-section on
Creative Commons licenses. There is a general prohibition on that page against
non-commercial licenses, but nothing about non-derivative, not even in the
specific sub-section.
> See [[Wikipedia:Image use policy]] which states "You can prove that the
> copyright holder has licensed the image under a free license."
I did in fact look at that page as well, and that is not the relevant section.
That section is about whether you can upload the media. For example it also has
the option "you own the rights to the image" and one for "fair use".
You then go down just a bit further to find what "free license" is acceptable.
Again, it explicitly forbids non-commercial use licenses, but is silent on
non-derivative licenses. You then go to another page for "acceptable image tags"
(WP:TAG). Again, a general prohibition on non-commercial license is stated
(sort-of... e.g. if you go all the way down under generic free licenses), but no
general prohibition on non-deriv. Of course, under the specific creative commons
section, you would not find no-deriv licenses.
So I found it less than clear, even for "creators of content" rather than "users
for content", and rationale is not given in any case.
> >We even allow "fair use" under some restricted circumstances. This
> > does not allow for derivative works either, and in fact poses downstream
> > problems.
>
> Our intention of allowing fair use images is to fulfil our
> encyclopedic goals for material which can not be made available under
> another license.
>
> The downstream implication is that if we have a valid fair use claim
> and they are doing something similar to us, then they should have a
> fair use claim as well.
>
But if the downstream users are doing something different, then they might not,
and in any case a fair use claim is not a let to make derivative works
(notwithstanding media transfers, which as I say is allowed anyway).
It seems to me that CC-BY-ND, therefore, is intermediate between a copyleft and
fair-use. And we do, as you say, allow fair use, under some circumstances. We
should therefore allow CC-BY-ND under at least the same circumstances, and
probably more. No?
Regards,
Daniel
> Which, when you're invested in NPOV, is truth, since our goal, at
> least on subjects where there's dispute, is not to say "It's an
> elephant" but rather "This is what seven people say about it."
>
But there are more than seven people who say elephants are three times
as tall as a giraffe thanks to [[Stephen Colbert]]'s TV show. :-(
Though they say any publicity is good publicity...
Kim van der Linde wrote
> charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com wrote:
> > It is going to be a lot easier for WP to improve
> > article content, in areas where it actually has some welcome
> > competition, than it is going to be for those rivals to import into
> > their site the necessary redirects and so on, to give the
> > navigational smooth ride.
> Why should only Wikipedia be able to do that?
Yes, why should another site not get the grunt work done? I guess because they start with a 'more chiefs than Indians' model of intellectual work? Delegation to the nearest graduate student actually works in academia, sort of. People get doctorates for doing what someone memorably called the more boring parts broken off the professor's research program.
Just who gets excited enough to add all those variants of [[John of Jandun]], for a random example, on a site based on a star system (as if that was a panacea)?
Charles
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> Or instead, we could try to keep up with growth by implementing some more
> advanced soft controls of our own.
I know I've seen some people stating on their userpages something to the effect
that if you can produce verification that you are an expert in a field, they
will kill an AfD on an article in that field on your word that it is notable.
I'm curious if anyone takes them up on this?
Dan