[WikiEN-l] Dead wikipedians and how to really make a project boring to death

Thu Jul 27 19:11:31 UTC 2006

Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 7/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>I think you are all missing Antheres point. Who cares whether it's
>>fair use or not? Do we really have to be so anal about the rules that
>>we will infact bring this to IfD, instead of just quietly ignoring the
>>copyright issue in this very special unique case. We are people, for
>>christs sake, not automatons! Sometimes, process is not that
>>important.
>>    
>>
>Fair use is an extremely important exemption to copyright law. There
>are good reasons to prohibit it e.g. in the User: space, and to
>require users to upload their own works as free content. But there is
>no single good reason why a photo that is important to Wikipedia's
>history, and that cannot easily be obtained as free content, wouldn't
>qualify as fair use in the Wikipedia: namespace.
>
>It's dogmatic thinking about these issues that is dangerous. But
>"quietly ignoring" doesn't solve the problem -- it only means that
>sooner or later it will come up again, either in this case or in
>another similar one. Not quietly ignoring it, but talking about it, to
>me demonstrates a greater sense of responsibility and empathy.
>
>With that said: I think that our memorial page at
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADeceased_Wikipedians
>demonstrates that there are a lot of people who do care about how we
>preserve the memory of Wikipedians who have passed on. Caring about
>knowledge, ultimately, is always caring about people. Because
>knowledge is nothing without the human beings who collect, derive, and
>use it -- and who, in doing so, always build upon the works of the
>generations who came before them. To honor the members of our own
>community therefore is a natural expression of the love of knowledge,
>and the love of humanity.
>
I share these sentiments.  Sometimes obeying the rules as they are 
written simply does not make sense.  The text of the law may be in black 
and white, but it should not be read so as to prop up the illusion of 
certainty.

It's difficult to estimate how many deceased Wikipedians there really 
are, but I suspect there are far more than are represented on the cited 
page.  We profit a lot from the imminently dying Wikipedians, the ones 
with long degenerative and terminal illnesses who at some point quietly 
stop editing for no apparent reason.  Perhaps they are undergoing 
gruelling courses of chemotherapy or feeling the ravages of AIDS.  To 
complain publicly would be a blow to their pride.  Their health will not 
allow them a "real job".  Maybe, for a while, they have one good hour 
each day and they want to feel useful rather than to spend that hour 
watching yet another mindless rerun on TV.  So they edit a Wiki, and for 
doing that the reward is the feeling that they have done something 
useful.  Conveniently, I just read this morning in Kenzaburo Oe's novel 
"Somersault": "When a person thinks about death or is actually facing 
death,if he's convinced that his life and death are fine the way they 
are, isn't he saved?"

When there are those for whom editing a Wiki is such a profoundly 
personal act, aren't we being a little too disrespectful when we start 
whining about the copyright minutiae that they overlooked when they were 
editing.

Ec