On 9/28/07, Charlotte Webb
<charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/27/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Close on 50% of the images on en are non free.
Text on the other hand?
A few percent maybe.
Maybe you mean "a few percent" of all articles contain unfree exerpts
of a larger published work... I could stomach that.
But saying "a few percent" of all article text is unfree... that seems
excessive, and hopefully incorrect.
Well, it depends on what we're looking at, but I assume most articles
contain at the very least quotations under copyright. I would be surprised
if the absolute number of articles with copyrighted text in them is only a
few percent. I would not be surprised if the overall proportion of
copyrighted text in Wikipedia, however, is a few percent - that seems about
right. You can't write a proper, comprehensive encyclopaedia article without
quoting someone (be it a historian, the article's subject, etc.), unless
you're intentionally going out of your way to make life difficult for
yourself and your readership.
I think this is untrue in many subject areas; in practice, no quotes
are needed for most technical articles and many popular culture
articles. They should be more common in history and so forth.
I don't mean to overemphasize the use of fair-use quotes in the
encyclopedia; I try to be realistic about it. My point is that
whatever that use is, it is enthusiastically embraced as necessary and
proper.
My derived point is that it's somewhat hypocritical to have a
different stance regarding appropriate and carefully chosen fair-use
images than for appropriate and carefully chosen fair-use text.
We would probably do better to have more of both, rather than less, as
an Encyclopedia, for the Readers.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com