[Foundation-l] Offering Wikibooks content for sale

Wed Jul 5 01:25:50 UTC 2006

Am Dienstag, 04. Juli 2006 18:25 schrieb Robert Scott Horning:
> 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.

Maybe I can give some further information here as I am involved member of the 
de.wikipedia community (note: I am not part of Directmedia I am a 
de.wikipedia community member).

Directmedia did not only publish the German Wikipedia DVD but also the 
WikiPress books (http://www.wikipress.de) which are compiled parts of 
de.wikipedia (to be precise the books get published by a sister company 
called Zenodot run by the same people). In case of the DVD and the books all 
authors get named, the source, the license (full print in English and German) 
and the relationship of that product towards Wikipedia, the community and 
Wikimedia.

In order to see how exactly the license conditions and so forth were respected 
by the books have for example a look at the Wikipress book that I did 
compile:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:WikiPress_6_Sonnensystem.pdf

If there are people interested I (and some other people) can share some more 
experience about the creation process of that books.

All these products have in common that they stress the point that they weren't 
created and released by "a Wikimedia organisation" but by the (interested) 
individuals of Wikipedia in cooperation with Directmedia/Zenodot in the "wiki 
style" which is radical new for such products like DVDs and books. So the 
community aspect is one of the key selling points.

Of course these products do support Wikimedia and are appreciated and 
supported by Wikimedia after some arrangements have been done.

This rather independent working style has also something to do with the 
relationship of de.wikipedia community and Wikimedia. Generally Wikimedia 
Foundation is the necessary support organisation for de.wikipedia that 
generously enables them creating their own content within a wide range of 
possibilities and which doesn't interfere a lot with their daily business as 
long there's no absolut (legal) emergency. So it's mostly some kind of 
respect towards a separated organisation people normally wouldn't advance in 
order to support their own business but which gets credited for the shadow 
work that made their work possible.

I personally would suggest the following policy:
* Do not give the impression creating an official Wikimedia product as long as 
there hasn't been an official agreement.
* Speak only for yourself and involved people as long there hasn't been an 
official agreement.
* Respect Wikimedia trademarks.
* If it is a community project (community is nothing official just a larger 
crowd of good faith people) make a project page in the wiki for organisating 
the matter that naturally also can contain links to offsite pages connected 
with it.
* Try to merge back any improvements.
* Never link from article namespace to the project (page) and it's results 
only link from the relevant project and portal page (I generally think that 
portal and project page links should be removed from articles).
* If the book can be buyed link the ISBN (not Amazon book numbers and such in 
order to be vendor neutral) alongside (!) a link to the free downloadable pdf 
at the allowed places in the wiki, so that people can freely choose by 
themselves.
* An upload of the final pdf to the wiki is part of the back merge and thatfor 
appreciated.

So I personally think that Wikisource project page link of the "Wikijunior" 
book would have been ok if the book wouldn't give that false impression that 
it is an official Wikimedia product and and if the book would have another 
name (beside respecting the GFDL).

Arnomane