[Foundation-l] Stewards are ignoring requests for CheckUser information?

Wed Apr 19 13:27:26 UTC 2006

On 4/19/06, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't think the difference with Wikipedia is as large as you state
> here. Sure, one can rewrite a Wikipedia article and still have an
> encyclopedia article, but one can also easily make small changes that
> are simply incorrect. Someone who changes the digits of pi in
> wikisource isn't that much different from someone who changes an
> article on Wikipedia to state that Hitler was born in China. Do they
> have the right to do that? I'm not sure. But someone is definitely
> allowed to take a Wikipedia article, change it to say that Hitler was
> born in China, and publish that under the GNU/FDL. Likewise, they have
> the right to take the value of Pi from Wikisource, change it, and put
> that on their website.

 I think the point of Ec's argument was missed.  I believe he was getting at
a slightly more fundamental point--something more along the lines of the
"purpose" (kind of a bad term, I know) of the two projects: the fact that
one project's personal goals might not fit another project's personal
goals.  In the case of Wikipedia, there is always a sense of
"incompleteness" about the articles; there's always something that can be
added to a Wikipedia article that can make it better.  But, at some point in
the evolution of a text at Wikisource, there is a point where this
completeness is reached: the point in time when the text matches a
previously published version of that work.  Once this point is reached,
there is no need to edit the text anymore, for no more modifications could
be made that would leave it the same text that was previously published.

Sure, a person always has the right to edit any work on Wikisource, but the
matter at stake is that remodification is not one of our goals, for after a
certain point in time, Wikisource would not see anymore modifications
necessary.  Let's say Wikisource published a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Maybe the scrolls have spelling errors in them.  How important is it to be
able to fix those spelling mistakes?  Wikisource would say it's important
NOT to fix them, since those mistakes are present in the original text and
should be faithfully reproduced for any person who wants to closely study
the scrolls without having to handle them in person.

Sorry about the length of this.  What I'm trying to say, is that
Wikisource's main goal is archiving, which Wikipedia's is not.  Because of
this difference, Wikipedia's goals will not work with Wikisource and
Wikisource's won't work with Wikipedia.  This illustrates that fact that a
set of broad, kind of vague, group of over-arching goals is needed for every
project to follow while each project still has the freedom to custom-tailor
its immediate goals to its own aims.

And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the
> Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the
> right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet"
> isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take
> stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which
> means that others have the right to republish. That that is under
> different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be
> under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied
> unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced
> by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of
> Wikimedia.

This philosophy is one which causes no small amount of grief for many
editors and contributors at Wikisource.  Many times we've been approached by
people who had excellent documents that have great value in and of
themselves, but we must turn away those works because of licensing problems
(maybe they're released under a non-commercial license or Wikisource could
get the permission to display them on the web yet not allow other people to
mercilessly copy and redistribute those texts).  I will agree, republication
is a great idea, but it's come at a fair price, and for the archivists at
Wikisource that price is infuriating.

Why couldn't the Wikimedia philosophy be tweaked a bit to allow some works
to explicitly not be redistributable?  The text would of course be freely
accessible to all, but no one can go put it on their own website without
proper permission.  The blanket statement of ensuring total, absolute
freedom drastically cuts down the amount of things that can be presented to
the world on the Wikimedia projects.  But what's more important: allowing
third parties to freely distribute our own works or being able to share
valuable information that would have otherwise gone unbeknownst to the rest
of the world with the stipulation that it can only be presented on a
Wikimedia project?