[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Tue Jul 4 16:25:12 UTC 2006

Anthony wrote:

>On 7/4/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>  
>
>I'll let Brad respond to this rather than trying to guess his response
>(I do have a good guess though).  Note that German Wikipedia is
>published by Directmedia, not Wikimedia.
>
>Anthony
>  
>
The difference with the German Wikipedia is that Directmedia has, on 
their own inititive, created the "product" and are selling it according 
to the terms of the GFDL.  Some arrangements have been made with the 
WMF, but that is to deal with the fine points of trademark issues.

I guess it is the same thing in this case, as far as a bold user going 
off and publishing a book of Wikimedia content on his own.  Certainly no 
"permission" is needed from the WMF, but it does help if this sort of 
thing is coordinated somehow.  There is a percieved need for something 
like this with the Wikibooks community, and it would involve more than 
simply a distribution of a CD-ROM set.  Some of my solititation of 
comments on this matter is to see just how involved the WMF really wants 
to get in this sort of publication, or if a group of project users can 
(or should) get together and form another "company" to deal with this. 
 That was more the direction I was going to go simply because it seemed 
as though the WMF didn't want to get involved.

I would rather work through the WMF as it does solve some legal hassles, 
but I can understand if they (the WMF board) wants to stay away from 
this completely.

If this content is made available, the other real issue that I havn't 
seen addressed in the replies is what policy should be in place to 
external websites that offer content like this for sale?  If there were 
an "official" WMF website, it would be much more reasonable to have a 
policy that only the "official" site could be linked from project pages, 
especially if they are very prominent pages like [[Main Page]].  It 
would be from my perspective to be reasonable to ban all other types of 
site links, although in some ways this does deal with the whole ISBN 
link issue that has plagued this mailing list in the past.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning