User talk:Ram-Man/archive6

Multi license tagging

I've tagged my main page... it's lost temporarily though because of various reasons. Should be back soon. - Ta bu shi da yu 10:28, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)

GFDL, etc.,

Hi,

I don't mind making available my contributions to others. However,I have to read all the fine print carefully and then decide what category to put them under. Right now I don't have the time. Will do it shortly. KRS 15:38, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Confused

I'm jsut confused by the whole thing. Since few of my contributions are really mine -- some have been changed in ways I thoroughly disagree with, others, like WaltPohl's changes to Feudalism, are great. Anyway, I thought the whole wiki thing was that nothing belongs to any of us. That being the case, isn't this all academic and up to Jimbo? JHK

I am surprised at the way even Jimbo seems to be looking at the content of Wikipedia from a perspective of pieces of work. We should be looking at each user's edits as individual works, and Wikipedia's articles as derivative works incorporating all of them together. Thereby, I can still release my contributions under CC-BY, which (I think) makes them legitimate for inclusion into the whole article, which is then released under GFDL. - [[User:KeithTyler|Keith D. Tyler [flame]]] 23:38, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

Requesting more detail

I had no idea I was in the top 2000. I still don't think I am. Regardless... Can you explain to me what exactly is the incompatibility between GFDL and CC-BY-SA?

To put it simply, each license, while very similar in purpose and meaning, states that only the same identical license (itself or any later version) may be used for derivative works. So if I modify a GFDL document, it must be GFDL. The same for CC-BY-SA. The text of the license specifically restricts the license to itself only, so the licenses are only compatible with themselves. -- RM

Then doesn't that cause problems for Wikipedia? Since Wikipedia as a whole is licensed as GFDL, then me dual licensing my material as GFDL and CC-BY-SA will effectively make Wikipedia in violation of my dual license. - KT

No, a copyright holder can license his original contributions under any license he sees fit, including using different incompatible licenses. If others agree to this, the multi-licensing chain is maintained, but it can be easily broken and by default the GFDL chain will always "stick". -- RM

The idea of having to multi-license works foretells a nightmare of having to release everything we do with a veritable cluttered patchwork of licenses.

The purpose of not making this a Wikipedia policy is to avoid mandatory nightmares. If someone seeks to use any article in a multi-licensed fashion, it is soley their responsibility to remove the copyright violations from the copied document, not the responsibility of the copyright holder(s) of the article. -- RM

What I mean is that, as more forward-forcing licenses are created, and people start using them, then in order to ensure the free use of our material, we'll just have to tack on each of those liceneses to allow those people to use them. We will then be talking about Triple Licensing and Quadruple Licensing and so on. In fact, it starts to sound like anti-free interests could kill the free use movement simply by creating and pushing lots of forward-forcing "free use" licenses, causing a tangled mess of license tunnels. - KT

Yup, it is unfortunate. The fact that the CC licenses are popular helps. Only the public domain solves this problem by not being copyleft and fully compatible with every license. -- RM

Besides, if GFDL and CC-BY-SA are incompatible, isn't there then a conflict between using two licenses? Does it truly imply the freedom of both, or does it imply the restrictions of both?

The latter (I think). Both licenses only allow themselves, so in theory one would have to accept all copyleft licenses in order to have true freedom, but trying something like that is difficult at best. There are no perfect ways around this problem, but various people try different things that work for them, including multi-licensing under any form of the CC licenses, or even using the public domain. I'm not sure if I am answering your question here... -- RM

Not quite, but you illustrate a problem. If dual licensing implies the restrictions of both, then in order to reuse my work, any reuser has to dual license it as well. That sucks. - KT

Correct -- RM

No, this is not correct, I suspect RM misread your last question when he said Correct. A reuser can pick any of licenses you put your work under, and reuse your work under that license alone if they wish. By multi licensing, you're giving people the option to reuse your work under the GFDL or a different license or licenses. It is or and not and, if you don't not get what I mean. ~leif ☺ _HELO 20:20, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC)

Goodness, I must be more careful next time. What I thought you meant was that in order to keep something dual licensed, a reuser also has to dual-license it. You can never require someone to choose both licenses, because the licenses themselves forbid that! -- RM

Furthermore... Why would it not be enough for me to singly license everything with CC-BY or CC-BY-SA? Lastly, would it be possible simply to draw up a new license that was compatible with both, and just use that?

I've made a template (Template:WikimediaTextLicensing) which gives the WikiMedia foundation permission in the future to license my contributions for me under any copyleft license it chooses, thus freeing them from always having to ask me for new licenses. You can also explictly license under those two licenses, which will obviously widen the ability for your contributions to be shared in that manner. -- RM

I am leaning towards simply CC-BY, which will not force a license on any forward user. I do want attribution, and I also want to encourage reuse. If I license something as CC-BY, no matter what anyone else does with it, the original material is still free for use. I don't frankly like the -SA part very much, nor do I like the GFDL as of this discussion. I'll take a look at yours. - KT

I think if you use CC-BY, then if you'd want to use it in a GFDL or CC-BY-SA (or other copyleft) license, then all you need to do is keep the copyright information in derivative works and to give proper attributions. Sounds like a decent step up from public domain. -- RM

Thanks, Keith D. Tyler [flame] 18:12, Dec 16, 2004 (UTC) (reposted)

Hi

I'm not in favor of using Rambot to recruit people to your campaign for relicensing, and I encourage you to slow down a little bit here. You're making people confused and nervous, I'm afraid, even though this isn't your intention at all of course.

Hey thanks for your clarification. As it stands, I am not planning on doing anything until all discussions have taken place and concerns met, so no one needs be fearful or confused. It is unlikely that the bot will be used again, at least in any fashion similar to the way it was used. I'd still prefer to use it in a limited fashion, such as adding comments to small groups of user pages at a time, just to save me some time to work on other tasks at the same time. This is a different issue from whether or not to send the messages at all, which some people also oppose. -- RM

One of the things that you wrote somewhere was something about getting "90%" agreement. This would not be enough. Only unanimous agreement makes a license change possible. This is why I think it is pointless and silly to try to relicense all of wikipedia, especially since a reform of the GNU FDL is coming soon in the next version.

One does not need 100% of all users to change the licenses of certain individual articles, just the editors of those articles or the portions of those articles to be copied. I have stated countless times that I am not trying to change Wikipedia's license because a new version of the GFDL is coming, and it should make it a much better and preferred license. The reason for getting as many users as possible is to make Wikipedia content as open as possible before it becomes encumbered by a license. -- RM

I do not oppose, however, the attempt to find a way to get your Rambot articles into wikitravel. This is a particular unique case, and it seems that the effort is sensible and worthwhile. But this is not, in my opinion, the best way to move forward with all of wikipedia. --Jimbo Wales 20:17, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

After a long discussion, I do plan on focusing my attention on users who have edited the "rambot articles". That has always been my primary goal, although many users have not seen to agree to just those articles, but to all articles. The main problem was that I did not figure out who those users were, because it was a difficult process to find out. But such is life, and I will have the bot figure that out from this point. Do you mean that you don't desire Wikipedia to be multi-licensed because (1) You oppose the idea of sharing all Wikipedia content under another copyleft license or (2) You just oppose the idea of trying to change the policy here, such as mandatory multi-licensing or even an official policy supporting it. Put another way, is this a problem with sharing or a problem with policy? -- RM

I'm strongly in favor of sharing, of course. And I would not mind multi-licensing. I am quite hopeful, rather, that all of this will prove to be a confusing waste of effort, as it is my belief that the next revision of GNU FDL 2.0 will take care of all this seamlessly anyway. The main thing I would stress is that we should avoid talk about 'forks' and avoid talk about 'mandatory' and even talk about "license change" unless we make it very very clear that license change requires unanimity for the portions of a document to be changed. --Jimbo Wales 21:45, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Then we are in agreement. I just wanted to clarify that point. Oddly, if it becomes a wasted effort, then I will have "won" anyway. Woohoo. I guess a lot of users became a bit more educated about licensing issues. I wonder how long it will take for an improved GFDL though? -- RM

Please advise

Ram Man: This is Michael Reiter. I would like to know to take advantage of what you are proposing. Write me back and tell me what you want me to do. J. Michael Reiter.

against multi-licensing

I'd like to voice opposition to multi-licensing. If cc-sa and gfdl are really that similar in spirit, I'd rather wait for gfdl 2.0 to resolve the differences. Multi-licensing is a big headache in the free software world; we don't need a similar headache here.

I also have nothing against attribution in general, but I really enjoy the egoless, collaborative nature of wikipedia editing and in fact I usually don't bother to log in when I edit. So I wouldn't like it if wikipedia incorporated any type of formal attribution requirement. People should follow traditional academic standards for citing significant pieces of work outside wikipedia, but wikipedia itself should be considered the work of a large, amorphous, collaborative group, like the Beatles songs credited to Lennon/McCartney (per their agreement) no matter which of Lennon or McCartney actually wrote the song. The genealogy of any particular article can of course mostly be traced through its editing history. That can leave it unremarked when someone (as is permissible) cuts and pastes pieces of text from one wikipedia article to another, but I don't think that causes any confusion in practice.

Phr 09:08, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)Phr

I tend to agree with your argument, but I don't have any high hopes that GFDL 2.0 will resolve all the problems. There is an argument that Wikipedia is a single collaborative work, but the fact that it is explicitly placed under the GFDL might negate that. Thus we already have a formal attribution requirement, as the GFDL has a formal attribution requirement. I suppose one can hope that GFDL 2.0 will allow one to simply print out a URL where the GFDL and the list of all the authors can be found, but I don't have any high hopes for this. It would be a very significant change to the GFDL, especially if you consider the fact that Wikipedia is not the only GFDLed work. anthony 警告 12:41, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Oops, I just realized this was Ram-Man's talk page. Sorry about that Ram-Man :). anthony 警告 12:42, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Having read the above and some other contributions, I now feel uncomfortable about the multi-licencing issues and will therefore remove the notice from my User Page. Chris Jefferies 13:17, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

licensing under pseudonyms

There is a question that is bothering me: as very few of us edit under our real names (and I, for one, do not want to disclose mine), how can anyone know who is licensing what? Filiocht 09:17, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

• You can't. That's one of the reasons we should UseRealNames (or just be anonymous). anthony 警告 12:35, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

RFA thanks

Salve, Ram-Man!
I wanted to drop you a line to thank you for your support in my successful RFA candidacy. It was very gratifying to see the kind remarks posted in the debate. Ave! PedanticallySpeaking 17:45, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

About Rambot

Salve, Ram-Man!
When I was thanking the voters on my RFA election, I found someone discussing census data and looked at the site they mentioned. To my surprise, I found that there was indeed data on Ohio's townships; I had presumed there was not, which is why Rambot had not added the demographic information. I've created articles on the townships of Warren County, Ohio#Townships and the only population information in them is what was in the Ohio Secretary of State's roster, namely the 2000 and 1990 populations.
While I realize it would not be as easy as the municipality and CDP articles because of the repetition of names--there are dozens of Washington Townships--and the long names we've been using on these articles (e.g. Union Township, Warren County, Ohio), but is it possible for Rambot to take the Census datasets and add the data to the township articles? Ave! PedanticallySpeaking 18:45, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

I can look into it. It is possible that the rambot was unable to add the information because the township articles already existed. I'll check it out and get back to you or just fix it anyway. [[User:Ram-Man|-- RM]] 18:58, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

Josh on multi-licensing

• I am sorry that I did not get back to you sooner, but I had to take a little break from Wikipedia to study for my final exams. I have looked at the arguments on this page and at the available multi-licensing templates, and I have decided to:
  • Release all of my minor text edits to the public domain, as they are hardly eligible for copyright anyway.
  • Dual license all of my other text edits with the Creative Commons By-SA 1.0 and 2.0 licenses, as you suggested.
  • Give Wikimedia permission to relicense my text edits in the future, in case they ever want to change Wikipedia's license. (Although I doubt that will happen.)
• My only concern is that derivative works made outside Wikipedia might be incompatible for re-integration, but hopefully that is a chance worth taking.
• Also, can anonymous contributors really claim copyright, since there is no real way to prove who they are? If not, changing Wikipedia's license would not be as difficult, and I would support it. Of course, even getting every registered user to relicense would still be quite difficult.
• Finally, I am glad that you decided to stop using your automated program to send these requests. The message did not offend me, but personal attention is almost always better for those sorts of things. Josh 05:22, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)

Multi-license

No problem, I've put the dual license in my user page. I'm all for making my work more useful, but still free. --AstroNomer 00:25, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

Multi-license

I finally am responding to your comment on my user page. I did agree to multilicense under the CC license with the suggested template. Thanks for telling me! I really like that license better anyway! Good luck with it!--naryathegreat 03:52, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

Multi-License

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

--[[User:Plato|Comrade Nick @)---^--]] 02:22, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Multilicensing spam

I agree to multi-license some of my contributions as follows: If an article is edited by User:Rambot, all my subsequent contributions to that article are licensed under the same terms as the contribution to that article by User:Rambot.

I'm sure all edits that fall under the above category are/will be too minor to be copyrightable anyway, so I'm not spamming my user page with licensing info. -- Paddu 06:47, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Licensing info from Cwoyte

Hello RM, I've changed position slightly. It boils down to this: all edits by me that I've marked 'minor' (regardless of subject) I've released into the PD; all other ('major', or, rather, non-minor) edits by me remain GFDL. See my user page. Good luck, Cwoyte 13:48, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)

• I find merit that any attempts to dual license will simply cause a complete mess on Wikipedia with articles being all over the place in terms of license. e.g. if cwoyte added a few paragraphs in an article and marked it non-minor, they would be under GFDL; then, if some spelling corrections were made, it would be marked as minor - although still under GFDL, it's hard to know whether the *entire* revision article should be counted as PD. It would be require a lot of matching up of different revisions of the article. Enochlau 15:41, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)
  • We need to stop thinking of articles as pieces of work of sole authorship, and look at articles more as derivative works comprised of a set of contributions from various sources. If, for example, all contributions were licensed CC-BY, then the articles could be rereleased as CC-BY, CC-BY-SA, or GFDL. As it stands, we seem to indicate or imply that all contributions are GFDL. - [[User:KeithTyler|Keith D. Tyler [flame]]] 20:55, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)

CC-by-SA

I'm pleased, Ram-Man, that you took the initiative on licensing. It's a long-overdue task, and one which I think will benefit Wikipedia in the long haul. I do not object to the message appearing on my user page; I treat it as akin to a newsletter a condo resident might receive - while unsolicited, of potential interest and certainly not spam. One reason I find the process of value is that I spent considerable time weighing the license options available to me, and have been using cc-by-sa with all my images for some time now. It satisfies me the most in assuring that my work meets Wikipedia's licensing requirements while still offering me some protection as the creator of the work. Denni☯ 21:25, 2004 Dec 18 (UTC)

Response to licensing thing

As is now mentioned on my user page, all my textual contributions are in the public domain. My images and other things will probably also be in the public domain. I'll try to explicitly give the licensing status of each of these non-textual things when I upload them. —Bkell 23:49, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Rejection of multi-licensing, affirmation of GFDL

For the record, I would prefer that my contributions remain under the GFDL license alone, such as they are. That's the license that was in effect when I made the edits, as the text at the bottom of every edit page makes very clear. I don't see any compelling reason to change that. When I write for wikipedia, I do it because I want to contribute specifically to wikipedia, and don't see any special reason to want to broaden that more than the GFDL already allows. (shrug) Wesley 03:47, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

CC Licence

I am am glad that you appear to be trying to multilicense Wikipedia as I feel that the GFDL, although good, has many flaws and limitations (discussed at GFDL) including that it is not compatible with CC.

Instead of getting everyone to agree to duel release their stuff, you should drive to have Wikipedia offically start releasing new content under a multilicense. This way we will have a limited set of people to try and convince to multilicense their stuff instead of a growing one. --ShaunMacPherson 08:44, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Copyrights by Pouya

Thanks for your efforts for increasing coverage of multiple-licencing. I accept multiple licencing my edits and added the necessary templates to my user page. --Pouya 12:16, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Multi-licensing - Wikimedia Compatible License

Hi Ram-man. I know you have received similar objections already, but as people who don't respond are being counted as tacitly agreeing with your approach I thought I'd better drop a note. Here are my reactions to your recent post on my talk page:

1. Spam. My first reaction, and something I'm not happy about. There are other places to make general announcements and requests, not bulk-mailing everyone's talk pages (although I must say it was interesting to find I'm in the top 2000 editors. How did you get this info? The list in the spam only goes to 1000)
2. Confusing. I couldn't understand quite what it was asking. I certainly didn't understand the implications of it. Even now, having spent (wasted?) a long while reading around the subject I don't really understand.
3. My response to the multi-licensing issue is that I am submitting material to Wikipedia under the GFDL. I don't think the issue should be confused (as it certainly now has been) by trying to operate several different licenses underneath the broader project-wide license. A better approach would be to address the problems at a higher level. If Wikipedia decides to change the license it operates under, I am happy for any of my material to be published under the new license, whatever that license is, providing that it is 'free and open'. More importantly Wikipedia does not need to ask permission to make such a change. If I put any license on my page it would be something like:

Wikimedia Compatible License: All my contributions to Wikipedia and any other Wikimedia projects are governed by the current applicable license(s) of those projects. The content or scope of these licenses may, by community concensus, be modified from time to time. I give permission for any and all of my contributions to be republished under any such future license, providing the new license retains the principle of 'open and free information'.

--HappyDog 16:34, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Re: Article Licensing (that you submitted on 10 December 2004)

I do not fully understand what you mean if I would be willing to multi-license all of my contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. What is multi licensing? As of now, I concentrate in Chinese Wikipedia where I am an administrator with much work to do. I have not logged in to English Wikipedia for very long time, so I have not replied until now. Jusjih 10:27, 18 Dec 2004 (UTC)

non-ASCII ISO 8859-1 literals / HTML entity references

Greeetings. I noticed that your bot is replacing literal ISO-8859-1, non-ASCII characters like "°" and "²" with the corresponding entity references. Since the English Wikipedia does specify ISO-8859-1, and not the ASCII subset, maybe your bot can just use the literal values in these cases. Any thoughts? Fleminra 04:53, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. The best reference I can find on this is meta:Help:Special characters. Also, I noticed that the "character palette" at the bottom of the "Edit" template here uses the literal ISO 8859-1 values, and uses named HTML entity references only for glyphs outside of that set (ndash and mdash). So maybe the best policy, also considering Wikipedia:Browser notes, would be to use literal characters for the "safe" ISO 8859-1 subset tabulated here: meta:Help:Special characters#ISO-8859-1 Characters. Fleminra 20:12, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

Creative Commons License subcategory

Hi, I work on parenting a lot of orphan categories, and the creative common license subcategory is an orphan...I'm not sure where to parent it...but it will continue to show on scans of orphans til it does. Could you parent it as appropriate? Thanks Sortior 17:38, Dec 19, 2004 (UTC)

• could you do the same for Category:Public domain licensing Thanks Sortior 05:23, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)

I agree to multi-license with CC-by-SA. Mindspillage 22:36, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

UN/LOCODE

I think you could insert the redirects like USLAX. This is general use for abbreviations in Wikipedia. If one day more of the links have to be disambiguatet we can talk again about doing it like UN/LOCODE:USLAX.

Maybe you start with US Locodes, and than go on with english speaking countries because the name in UN/LOCODE-database for those should be more or less equal to the names used in Wikipedia.

Is it faster (less molesting for wikidatabase) to simultaenously edit the corresponding citypages and add the UN/LOCODE there, or can this be done in different process? We have to think about where and how to put the LOCODE, and whether to insert shortcut hint. Some people may find the shortcut hint ugly. Should we just try it for some places? Would be a way to find out what others think. Tobias Conradi 00:04, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I assume that shortcuts in the articles would be a mistake. I think people would find it ugly, so I have decided not to do that. That isn't to say it doesn't have a place in the article, but I don't know what that place would be right now. While it would make more sense to do everything at once, I don't have those answers right now, so they will just have to wait. It is unlikely that I won't have more things to do on the articles anyway in the future, so it probably won't matter. As for the short shortcuts, I plan to do the direct shortcuts in addition to the UN/LOCODE shortcut. It doesn't hurt to have multiple shortcuts. [[User:Ram-Man|-- RM]] 03:24, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

NonCommercial ShareAlike?

Again, the license problem. what's the difference between the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Dual License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Dual License? sorry i am too impatient to read all the English stuff... =.= --Yacht (talk) 06:38, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)

created Template:Mapit-US-countyscale

... in case you want to use it for the county articles. -- hike395 15:52, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I'll be sure to do the counties as well. -- RM 15:57, Dec 23, 2004 (UTC)