[Foundation-l] Copies of Wikipedia's articles found on Knol

Fri Aug 1 19:04:41 UTC 2008

David,

You are advocating a view of what freedom should mean.  Being free to do
absolutely ANYTHING with Wikipedia content as long as you attribute it to
Wikipedia is a perfectly respectable view.

However, there is segment of the community, myself included, that doesn't
feel comfortable with that level of radical freedom.  Maybe I'm cynical, but
I don't really want to donate my time and energy to a project if it is
likely that someone else will pick it up, add a few widgets and a little
text, and exploit it for private financial gain while give nothing back to
me or Wikipedia.

Strong copyleft gives me the protection that full-scale financial
exploitation with no return is unlikely.  Strong copyleft leads to the
expectation that I and others will also be able to benefit from the content
that others subsequently add to my work.

I realize it often feels like people writing for Wikipedia are giving our
efforts away for nothing, but in my mind we are buying reciprocity.  We are
buying the expectation that as others improve our work we will ultimately be
free to benefit from that as well.

If Wikipedia were simply CC-BY (or the equivalent), that would be a big
turn-off for someone like me.

Radical freedom comes with trade-offs.  Truly free content is more useful,
but I don't think the encyclopedia would have as extensive an editor
community if we dropped the copyleft provisions from our license.  And
without a large community, we wouldn't have the same size and scope we have
today.

Maybe I'm wrong about that.  Maybe a truly free encyclopedia would do just
as well (or even better) at attracting contributers, but I wouldn't count on
it.

-Robert Rohde

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 9:01 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> I know the following is not the current situation, but:
>
> The only thing we have any real reason to insist on for Wikipedia
> content is attribution, and the only attribution that should be
> necessary is attribution to Wikipedia with a link to where exactly it
> was taken.
>
> Everything we do beyond this is a practical restriction on the use of
> our content. Rather than making it free in any real sense of the word
> except the artificiality of copyleft, it makes it less free. Freedom
> with respect to intellectual property is the opportunity to take
> intellectual content and do what you will with it. Free material is
> material you can us for your own purposes, whatever they may be. (and
> I point out that putting restrictive licenses on something and
> republishing it does not destroy the underlying freedom; you can claim
> what copyright you want to claim, but it doesn't mean you have it.
> People do this with PD US government material routinely.)
>
> I seriously doubt any contributor of Wikipedia text content really
> cares about individual attribution to his individual contribution. How
> could they, given that we permit any modification whatever, and the
> contribution will in most cases be entangled hopeless in hundreds of
> others. When you read the disclaimer, you know that you are leaving it
> open to be twisted in any manner whatsoever and used for purposes
> completely alien to yours. Sometimes I care that people preserve the
> attribution to me personally of something I write--in those cases I
> write for a more convention medium--and will usually ask not just BY,
> but NC. Most people care about those two concepts--they write for
> reputation, and if there's any money, they want some of it. But not
> when they write for Wikipedia. There's no money, and your contribution
> will be to the encyclopedia as a whole. Yes, some people say that they
> wrote certain articles, but the most they can really say is that they
> started them or wrote some of what remains in the content.  You get no
> reputation from writing scattered sentences.
>
> Illustrations I am told may be different. sounds reasonable--they
> carry individual licensing statements--though again I am puzzled,
> because they are open to any editing whatever. If a photographer
> contributes his art, he lets us distort it. The version he
> contributed, though, is still there.
>
> There is a real point in advocating copyleft to change the world to
> the use of free content; I fully understand the desire to change the
> world to the merits of "libre" publishing.  But maintaining it in
> Wikipedia is  pointy--wp is there as an encyclopedia to be used, and
> the very thought that one could not take text and put it wherever you
> please is completely opposite to the spirit of contribution. Its the
> zealots and their legal ingenuity triumphing over commonsense and the
> need to actually provide a free encyclopedia in the way ordinary
> people mean "free".  They're using the technicalities of their
> licenses to restrict content if other  people want to use differently
> from the way they had in mind when they thought about how to develop
> non-commercial software. A brilliant innovation--but it should not
> apply to us.
>
> NYBrad show the right way a good lawyer approaches things: decide what
> we want to do, and find a legal way of doing it.  I'm not one, but I
> think  the easiest legal way is to change our license to the freest
> possible, and give people the right to ask that the content they
> contributed under another assumption be withdrawn and their text
> rewritten. If we need to rewrite two paragraphs a year, which is what
> i expect, i hereby offer to do it.
>
> On 7/31/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> In an unrelated comment, some people were wondering *why* Google is
> >> giving such limited license choices.  I don't know for sure, of
> >> course, and I don't think they'll give a straight answer, but one
> >> possibility is that they're worried about the implications ShareAlike
> >> licenses would have on embedded ads.
> >
> > Unless they're worried about reusers having embedded ads, I don't see
> > a problem - Google require you to grant them a pretty wide ranging
> > license in addition to whatever you give the public.
> >
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>
>
> --
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>
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