[WikiEN-l] Still RamBot and licensing again.

Wed Dec 15 11:56:16 UTC 2004

I would like to comment on something RamMan said on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ram-Man#Spambot.

He said

The reason not to make this an official solicitation is because this is a group project and the multi-licensing drive does not represent the desires of every Wikipedian.  It also does not strictly have ''anything'' to do with official Wikipedia policy, as the status of Wikipedia will remain unchanged and intact.  Now my [[User talk:Jimbo Wales|proposal]] to Jimbo is something that would affect Wikipedia policy and ''would'' be a good candidate for an official solicitation, if it was accepted.  Whether or not it is "official", however, is irrelevant in this context because a solicitation would still need to occur to get explicit permission. Multi-licensing is inherently a private issue, not one that Wikipedia needs to be delving its hands into. -- RM

I am troubled by this comment very much, doubly when I perfectly know some users want to change our license.

If you wanted this drive not to affect Wikipedia policy and not to sound official, and to be simply a relicensing of your geographical pages, you should have asked only editors who edited those articles, and you should have asked them to only relicense the geographical articles. As soon as you begin to ask people to relicense ALL their contributions, then it becomes official and it affects all of us and all projects.
I am sure you would agree that it would be damned stupid that the english wikipedia is under one license while all other wikipedias be under another license, because in becoming compatible with wikitravel, you would cause our projects to become non compatible with one another. So, in effect, this is a global issue and you are trying to force all projects to follow what you started, without even involving them. I think this is just incorrect toward other projects.

Even though dual licensing could be a good decision one day, this should be a global discussion.

---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
 Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more.