[Licom-l] Deleted Content

Mon Apr 20 16:07:07 UTC 2009

I'm sorry for being unclear.  My answer in this hypothetical would be this:

Whether the article is "live" or not is, in my view, orthogonal to the
question of whether it is part of the MMC that is being relicensed.  A
"dead" article, or an article that was scarcely viewed before it was hidden,
is part of the MMC by virtue of the fact that it can be restored at some
later date.

The confusion lies in the conflation of the notions of (1) publication and
(2) made publicly available.  Although in common language, the two notions
are identical or close ot it, in legal terms they are analytically distinct.
Hiding an article for lack of notability (for example) doesn't make it
nonpublished. It has still been published, and you can't unring that bell by
hiding it. (Also, making the article available at all and having it exist in
the MMC database, though hidden, is still publication for legal purposes, in
my view.)

Note that the answer becomes different if the article is wholly removed --
not merely hidden, but actually nonpresent, even in hidden form -- from the
MMC during the relicensing.  But that's not normally how we proceed.

--Mike

On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:52 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Mike Godwin <mgodwin at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
> >
> > Assuming I understand the question correctly (always a good caveat in
> these
> > discussions), I would distinguish conceptually between "republished" and
> > "restored."  One possible interpretation, given this distinction, is that
> an
> > MMC may include an edit history that contains deleted content, but the
> MMC
> > itself remains published (or is republished), and the relicensing
> applies
> > to everything in it, including the edit history, including deleted
> content.
> >
> > I think this may be the interpretation that involves the least amount of
> > administrative overhead.
> >
> > What do you think?
>
> Mike,
>
> I'm not entirely sure I understand the scope of your response.  Rather
> than speaking in abstract, perhaps it would be helpful to have a
> concrete (but fictional) case to frame discussion.
>
> Suppose a group of people are fans of the garage band Filthy Badgers.
> They create a Wikipedia page to celebrate the band.  It is a pretty
> good page with interesting content, but because the band doesn't meet
> Wikipedia's notability criteria for musical groups it is deleted.  At
> this point the band's article and its edit history are hidden from the
> public.
>
> Now, we go forward with relicensing.  Our live content is transformed
> from GFDL to GFDL + CC-BY-SA.
>
> Months later, say in December, suddenly the Filthy Badgers hit it big.
>  Overnight superstardom, record deals, huge publicity, the works.  Now
> the Badgers really are eligible for a Wikipedia article.
>
> At this point, we would be interested in undeleting the Badgers'
> original article to use as a seed for covering the band.
>
> Can we take that original article, written in the GFDL era and never
> live during the republishing window, and still restore its contents in
> the GFDL + CC-BY-SA era?
>
> -Robert
>
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