[Licom-l] More on dual licensing (updating Q&A)

Fri May 29 08:17:56 UTC 2009

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

<snip a lot of good points for discussion>

> * I seem to think that the latest-revision of articles will become
> CC-SA-only more quickly than most do - 2 years max before that
> includes most common articles.  I think it will happen via bot-enabled
> content additions drawing from an aggregate database of materials
> which have themselves included CC-SA works in the mix.  That sort of
> automated update can touch a large fraction of all articles, and they
> happen with some regularity.  But whether or not this is the case, I
> think we could make a reasonable guess as to what the latest GFDL
> revision of each article is; whereas your average reuser could not.

I am only going to comment on this last bit right now.

How many examples can you think of from the bulk importing of GFDL
text?  Choose a featured article at random, does it have any
externally published text in it that is neither fair use nor public
domain?

It isn't enough to merely touch an article, you must be adding a
copyright relevant amount of content.  Most bots that hits lots of
pages do things like formatting or number updating that would have no
impact on the licensing.

My expectation is that in 5 years, much less than 10% of Wikipedia
articles will have been affected by importing CC-BY-SA text.

So yes, from that regard we obviously have a very different set of expectations.

-Robert Rohde