Whilst browsing over the QI candidates page I noticed this image:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:EM_Spectrum_Properties.svg.
The image itself is licensed as public domain. However it is a
derivative of two images licensed under the GFDL
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:P_biology.svg and
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Skyscrapercompare.svg). Unless
I am misreading something quite badly, releasing a derivative of a
GFDL-licensed work to the public domain is a violation of the GFDL.
It is easy to fix one image, but I suspect we have deeper problems
throughout the project with a lack of respect for copyleft.
Establishing just how serious this issue is will be non-trivial, never
mind resolving it.
I can think of a number of approaches to this situation, some of which
are obviously harmful to the project and/or the free content movement
as a whole.
* Ignore the terms of the GFDL (or any other copyleft licenses) in this context.
* Treat them the same as any other copyright violation.
* Contact the creator of the derivative and inform him of the
pertinent terms of the original license; and ask him to change the
licensing on the derivative.
* Changing the licensing on the derivative work to be compatible with
the original work, and inform the creator of the new work of the
change and the reason why.
Furthermore we probably have the difficulties associated with of a
CC-BY-SA work and a GFDL work being combined. I'm no lawyer, but I
suspect to truly sort these cases out will need an additional release
from some of the creators of the original works.
If we cannot enforce the copyleft terms on our own community, can we
really expect external groups to?
Rama, nice post. :)
On 07/11/2007, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Yeah. Looking at his talk page makes me sad -- the usual round of
> scripted & stacked image deletion warnings for copyright reasons. We
> need socially more appropriate ways to deal with copyright issues.
The thing is...
Copyright is hard. It is a brick wall that is high, and I don't know
of any way of getting around it easily or quickly that isn't cheating,
ie fundamentally wrong, and likely to bite you on the arse in the
future. It's like weight loss, there is only one way that works - the
hard way.
You can be a great Wikimedian and not run into copyright for a long
time. You do not have to have a good understanding of copyright in
order to be a good contributor. This is because when you're only
contributing your own work, you don't run up against the copyright
wall. I'm giving my text up for free, OK, and anyone can use it
however they like, OK. But *as soon as* you want to include someone
else's work -- and for the vast majority of people, this is when they
want to include an image by someone else -- you meet the copyright
wall.
It's just so hard. Even if you wanted to minimise troubles and only
pick images from Flickr, you have to know which licenses are the
acceptable ones. Then - is this a derivative of anything else? Is it
reasonable that this user is in fact the copyright holder? Has this
user understood what they have agreed to by picking this license? What
if they change it? And this is an easy case. Pick up random-website
"attribution" like statements, or PD-age related questions and you can
soon give yourself a nice headache, trying to find the correct answer
when the fact is there is no one in the world that knows for sure what
it is, you only get that certainty with an expensive lawsuit.
There is no shortcut through these questions. There's no alternative
but to face each one as it comes and see how it applies to that
situation.
Given that Wikimedia = free content + anyone can edit, it seems that
by default it(we) must also take on the task of educating the general
public about copyright issues. No one else is doing it, and it's an
issue that has to be confronted, so it looks like it's up to us.
The instantaneous editing feature of Wikimedia conflicts with the
slower copyright learning process. It's pretty obvious that automated
templates are not the best solution to this overall dilemma but I
don't have any great ideas about where to next.
regards,
Brianna
user:pfctdayelise
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/
Obviously we have a problem out here.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Nov 30, 2007 4:39 PM
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Announcement: #ifexist limit
To: wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Please copy this to your local village pump or other relevant on-wiki forum.
Werdna's #ifexist limit feature is now live. In response to complaints of
template breakage, I have increased the limit on Wikimedia wikis
temporarily, from 100 to 2000. Barring a coup, it will stay at 2000 for
about a week, and then we'll lower it to 100.
Please use this one-week period to check pages and templates that use
#ifexist heavily. Look in the HTML source of the preview or page view.
There will be a "limit report" that looks like this:
<!--
Pre-expand include size: 617515/2048000 bytes
Post-expand include size: 360530/2048000 bytes
Template argument size: 51168/2048000 bytes
#ifexist count: 1887/2000
-->
This is the limit report from
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Potd/2007-12 ,
one of the pages that will break.
At the end of the week, any pages which have a #ifexist count of over 100
will cease to be rendered correctly (after the next edit or cache clear).
All #ifexist calls after the hundredth will be treated as if the target
does not exist.
In some cases it may be possible to rewrite your templates so that they
still do the same thing, but with less #ifexist calls. In other cases, you
will need to remove template features. Removing features is always sad, as
a sofware developer I know that, but sometimes it is necessary for the
good of the project. This is one of those times.
-- Tim Starling
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I'm cross posting the Village pumps with this announcement:
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_Pump>
Here's a project for all you who have a lot of free time, good graphics
skills and want to easily improve your image and edit count:
Commons:Pearson Scott Foresman
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Pearson_Scott_Foresman> could
use some talent.
And to the rest of you, if you think that page could use some
refactoring to help the process along, by all means, it's a wiki! Edit :)
--
Cary Bass
Volunteer Coordinator
Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://donate.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Phone: 727.231.0101
Fax: 727.258.0207
E-Mail: cbass(a)wikimedia.org
Sorry for cross-posting, but the original message wasn't sent to the
above lists although it affects the users at those projects just as
much. :-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Elisabeth Anderl <n9502784(a)students.meduniwien.ac.at>
Date: Nov 26, 2007 5:03 PM
Subject: [Wikiquote-l] set pagemoves to autoconfirmed - please read and comment
To: wiktionary-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org,
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, wikiquote-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org,
wikisource-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, wikispecies-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Dear Wikimedians, please read and comment the following plea, which is
of common interest through WMF-projects:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metapub#set_pagemoves_to_autoconfirmed_-_ple…
Many thanks in advance,
best regards,
Elisabeth Anderl (aka spacebirdy)
_______________________________________________
Wikiquote-l mailing list
Wikiquote-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikiquote-l
--
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023
---
Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to
this address will probably get lost.
Hi list, bonjour à tous,
en: I'm glad to announce you that I request the sysop flag on Commons,
after about one year of 'training' :)
fr: J'ai le plaisir de vous présenter ma candidature au poste
d'administrateur sur Commons, après un an d'"entraînement" :)
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Administrators/Requests_and_votes
Best regards from France,
Bien cordialement,
--
Alexandre.NOUVEL(a)alnoprods.net
|-> http://alnoprods.net
|-> L'encyclopédie libre et gratuite : http://fr.wikipedia.org
\ I hate spam. I kill spammers. Non mais.
I saw the "categorization drive" on Commons yesterday, and thought
that categorizing 6K images through the usual methods is not fun. Now
there are 5K left, and here's my contribution: CatLitter!
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/catlitter.php
The tool with the ultimate name for anything with categories scans
[[Category:Media needing categories]], then selects 50 users at
random, and shows their images in this category. Many users,
especially drive-by uploaders, upload images with a similar content,
so that seemed the way to group related images together.
Each image is shown as thumbnail with info, as well as a CatScan list
with possible categories, and some standard templates.
A textbox contains the image description minus {{uncat}}. Clicking on
suggested categories or templates adds/removes the respective item
to/from the textbox.
The text can, of course, be edited manually. the button opens the diff
edit view in a new window/tab.
Have fun,
Magnus
- Commons currently doesn't accept any RAW formats for uncompressed
original digital photography files.
- DNG is a RAW format developed by Adobe, intended to be an open
format. http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/index.html
- ImageMagick supports DNG. http://www.imagemagick.org/script/formats.php
- Format "patent license":
http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/license.html Is this acceptable?
If the terms of the DNG format are acceptable, is there any reason we
shouldn't request MW support for this format to be enabled and begin
encouraging photographers to start using it?
(I presume thumbnails would be generated as JPGs)
If we do this, are we likely to require an increase in the maximum
filesize limit? (currently 20mb)
I emailed with a magazine publisher recently and he made this comment
about Commons:
"There are indeed, some amazing images. I definitely believe that
publishers could use this resource if they're in need of (one more
image) to complete an existing project. But I'm uncertain about how
publishable much of the content is, especially in the absence of
higher resolution files (which disqualifies printing). "
So although our works are usually sufficient for web use, it seems
clear that we cannot present ourselves as a serious kind of archivist,
culture-recording project, without introducing a RAW format and
encouraging people to use it.
regards,
Brianna
--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/
On 22/11/2007, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
> > The question then is being able to upload the things at all. How
> > technically necessary is the 20MB limit? If we upped it to 40MB, or
> > 100MB, would the servers melt? What are the practical issues from the
> > view of the system administrators?
> Haven't we had this discussion already? Sort your mailbox by subject, it's
> right there.
Ah yes, sorry:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-October/034344.html
So that'll be a "not yet", then.
- d.
All -
we've set up a blog to accompany our annual fundraiser. The headlines
from the blog will be featured in the sitenotice:
http://whygive.wikimedia.org/
I'd like to invite you to submit posts to the blog. These posts can be
provocative, and should give compelling reasons to support the
Wikimedia Foundation. You can draft posts here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Why_Give_blog
Posts will be selected by a number of people: Cary Bass (our Volunteer
Coordinator), Sandy Ordonez (our Communications Manager), Sue Gardner
(Special Advisor to the Board), and myself. We'll probably try to have
a new post every 2-3 days at least.
Once again, the point of these posts is first and foremost to invite
the general public to donate. :-) Please submit stories in this
general spirit.
If you are willing to act as a moderator for comments to vet out spam
& trolling, please contact Cary Bass at <cbass AT wikimedia DOT org>.
For now, this is an experiment and as such, only in English. We will
set up blogs in other languages if this one has a measurable impact on
our fundraising.
Thanks for any and all help!
Erik Möller
Member of the Board