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

Sun Aug 3 17:18:21 UTC 2008

On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 7:49 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 6:23 AM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>
> wrote:
> > On Saturday 02 August 2008 05:41:35 David Goodman wrote:
> >> But fewer future works will build of Wikipedia  if they cant use it
> >> how they want. I find it interesting that the people here are
> >> concerned about financial rathe than intellectual credit.
> >
> > Both things you say are flat out wrong. First, it is by no means certain
> that
> > fewer future works will build on Wikipedia if it continues with a
> copyleft
> > license; immediately perhaps, but you are forgetting that people will be
> able
> > to build upon derivatives of derivatives, which would otherwise not be
> the
> > case.
>
>
> This line of argument is more interesting in theory than in practice.
>

In practice, has it ever been done?  Has any article in any one of the
Wikimedia projects ever been improved by someone outside the project and
then had the improvements added back without getting special permission?

I suppose this will be more likely to happen when (if) the projects move
from GFDL to CC-BY-SA.  But still, I wonder how big of a deal this is going
to be.

On the other hand, at least in terms of images, I believe there have been
cases of photographers who made money off their GFDL works, which likely
would not have happened under a non-copyleft license.