Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)

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GFDL?

I'm just curious why the GFDL was chosen, the pros and cons of it, why other possibilities weren't used, etc. Is there an archived debate on this subject? --Golbez 16:55, Sep 16, 2004 (UTC)

This decision predates Wikipedia going online. See Nupedia for some background. Andrewa 01:22, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Thanks. However, that link, and the Nupedia and Wikipedia link, don't seem to say why GFDL was chosen. That's what I'm curious about. --Golbez 02:29, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

Well for one thing, Creative Commons didn't exist at the time, but thats as much as I can say. —siro χ o

And this probably isn't the best place to ask what the differences between Creative Commons and GFDL are. And it's probably impossible to switch from one to another. --Golbez 03:27, Sep 17, 2004 (UTC)

Difficult, certainly. The point I was making is that the issue probably hasn't arisen. Wikipedia was GFDL from day one. Whether to use the GFDL has no more been an issue than whether to use a Wiki, or whether to use the Internet. I guess you could ask Jimbo why he and Larry were interested in using the GFDL, whether they considered any alternatives and why they settled on the GFDL if so, but that's academic now IMO. It worked. As for the rest of us, the GFDL was a given when we started editing. Andrewa 08:08, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, it is an issue for some, and I am pretty sure that the discussion has been had many times, although I don't know where. It would be a major pain to switch over, but would be (at least partly) possible to change if there was enough interest. Probably the drawbacks of the GFDL do not warent the teethpullingly traumatic process of changing. Mark Richards 02:05, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Many of the problems with Wikipedia's use of the GFDL can be seen at Why Wikitravel isn't GFDL. I remember there being some talk of working with the FSF to fix some of the brokenness of the license, but it's been a long time. -- Cyrius|✎ 03:37, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

One thing that we could do, is dual license all new contributions under the creative commons license. This would keep backwards compatability, and, eventually, allow us to move towards a position where much of the content was CC compatible. - see [1] - Mark Richards 03:58, 22 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That is not a good idea like it might seem to you at first, what you get yourself into that is the situation where derived content from wikipedia cannot be merged back into it.

For example, someone takes article foo on wikipedia and changes it under the GFDL, some wikipedians notice this and decide to merge it in wikipedia again, however the person that changed it did not dual licence it (as is his right, by defenition he can choose which licence if it is dual licenced) and thus the merged content and therefore the entire article from that point forward is only under the GFDL.

Lets say this then happened with another article here, bar, only this time the person modifying it modified it under the CC licence, same thing happens it gets merged back into bar which from that point onward can only be licenced under the CC licence.

We would then have a situation where either we could not merge most of the content that people take from here and change or a situation where we could not copy content between articles on wikipedia. This is of course a bad thing and is why we stay away from the much proposed dual-licence nonesense. -- Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 18:02, 2004 Sep 23 (UTC)

I was one of the people who have proposed that the Wikipedia migrate to Creative Commons. One of the critics mentioned that the CVS that Wikipedia uses isn't fine-tuned enough to nail down exactly who contributed what. So there would be some difficulty in writing a script that decides at what point an article would be free of GFDL-only material. Of course, in theory, a flesh-and-bone person could manually go through the page histories and make the decision themselves. This might work if someone wants to reuse an article in some manner, such as in a CC-based wiki. However, this would too time consuming and the possibilites for mistake are too great for migrating the entire Wikipedia to CC. So, basically, yeah, migrating to CC is possible but very difficult.

I'm a moderator at the LQwiki, which is a Creative Commons based (by-sa variant to be exact) Linux documentation wiki. We'd like to use Wikipedia material, not to mention the gobs of Linux documentation available under the GFDL, but our licensing scheme prevents this. So far, we've been asking the original authors of GFDL material for permission to use it under the CC-by-sa, but this is simply not possible to do with Wikipedia articles - too many editors, too many of them are anons. So I've been following the situation pretty closely. We're thinking of lobbying the FSF ourselves on the issue. Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to contact them or to argue our point?

In a way, this restriction is good thing. I've been incorporating the public domain Jargon File, and our wiki is small enough that I've been single-handedly causing a Rambot Effect. I'd hate to think what a flood of GFDL material might do. crazyeddie 07:18, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Managed Deletion

A new policy proposal is in the tweaking stages. Please take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Managed_Deletion for the details. Note that this is a modification of the Speedy Delete process only. If you disagree with the policy entirely, please wait for voting to cast your vote. If you can think of ways to improve the policy, please contribute constructive criticism on the Discussion page. The proposal is aimed primarily at administrators who perform speedy deletes, but all will no doubt have some interest in it. I anticipate voting beginning one week from today. Geogre 18:49, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Redirects

I've just been reverting a few edits by an anonymous user, where that user had taken away piped links and fed them through redirects. As it happens, some of the links he changed were wrong in the first place, but that's by-the-by. Anyway, he questioned my changes, and I stated that it was policy. (Refer to my talk page.) However, now I find myself in the position where I can't find where the policy of eliding redirects is written down. There's nothing explicit at Wikipedia:Redirect, or Wikipedia:How to edit a page#Links and URLs. The explanation I've given is "... I presume that this is to reduce server load (by reducing the additional code executed each time you click on a link that gets redirected)." Any pointers? Is this the reason? Shall I make policy more explicit? [[User:Noisy|Noisy | Talk]] 09:12, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Just a comment: linking to redirects in this way makes the wikitext less ugly than using piped links. — Matt 09:23, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Possibly unfree images

Based on a previous village pump discussion, a new page is being developed to handle the removal of images used under nonfree licenses or lacking source information. A poll on whether to implement this process is at Wikipedia talk:Possibly unfree images. --Michael Snow 03:26, 19 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Managed Deletion Voting: Coming Soon

Voting on the Managed Delete policy proposal will commence on Friday, September 24, 2004 and will be open for 2 weeks. Geogre 01:11, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Why is the site notice part of the article text now?

It is very annoying to have the MediaWiki:Sitenotice displayed as if it were the opening line of each page. Whoever did this, please undo it ASAP. It will only tend to turn people off instead of donate. --mav 16:58, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)

The Polls Are Open: Drive Carefully

Voting has begun on the Managed Deletion policy. Note that it will actually be called "Early Deletion." The policy has been finalized, so, even if you have looked at it before, please look again and give it your vote. Voting will end on October 8, 2004. Geogre 00:46, 24 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Year in X

Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Incorrect_date_formats states that, for example, 2000 is preferable to 2000 in film. I've lost count of the number of articles I've seen when someone has come along and changed it to the latter, breaking the agreed convention. This may be just a case of those people not knowing the rule but it is now so widespread that people just ignore it. Should the policy be reviewed or should we go through all the Year in X links and fix them? violet/riga (t) 14:34, 25 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Please don't go through all the links and change them just yet. If anything, ask for a policy review; this convention wasn't really "agreed to" at all. The MoS's requirement was copied (somewhat out of context) from Wikipedia:WikiProject Music standards, which lists an important exception to the guideline. There may very well be other reasonable exceptions to the guidelines applicable to non-music topics. This WikiProject-specific guideline was applied to the Wikipedia as a whole with little discussion. The standards for the Wikipedia as a whole should have a strong community-wide consensus. Even the WikiProject's consensus stands on uncertain ground, judging from the objections in the archived debate about the issue (which really isn't that important of an issue, IMHO). • Benc • 08:56, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Then the policy should be reviewed - it is as important as many other consistency issues. violet/riga (t) 09:28, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Presentation of Images

At present when a reader clicks on a thumbnail image to see the larger version of the image, they see it accompanied by a lot of irrelevant and unattractive material - the name of the image file, the image's edit history and technical details of its licensing etc. What readers should see is the image, with a caption and possibly a heading. There should then be a link to the edit history and licensing details, just as there is a link from an article to the article's edit history. This seems to me to be another example of how Wikipedia is currently structured in the interests of its writers and editors rather than in the interests of readers. How much difficulty would there be in restructing the image pages in this way? Adam 02:50, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia is relatively unusual in that the boundary between readers and writers/editors is quite fuzzy; the lack of a clean separation means that sometimes a reader encounters mechanisms for editing — such as the "Edit this page" link. I guess we tolerate editor-oriented mechansisms intruding into "content" when it isn't much of a distraction. Personally, I don't see much distraction in including "What links here", history and licensing data on an image page; a user can very obviously see the image and its caption. Moreover, images are somewhat different from articles in that they are rarely used as stand-alone entities — they are nearly always used as inline elements in the article space. If we implemented your suggestion, I think there'd be little improvement for a reader, but it would be quite a cumbersome change for editors. — Matt 08:56, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Actually they can't see the caption. The caption is visible under the photo on the article page, but not on the page where the image stands alone. What the reader sees is a bunch of stuff they don't want or need to see. Why would it be a cumbersome change for editors? Adam 11:53, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Regarding a caption, an image description page should contain a description of the image, and any that don't need fixing. Your change would mean an editor would click on a "What links here" or "History" to get the editor-oriented information; this extra click would be more hassle, if not "quite cumbersome". — Matt 12:39, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

A "description of the image" is not the same thing as the caption that appears at the article page.
- This is quite correct. Indeed, many images are (or have the potential to be) reused in several pages, with completely different captions; the caption on the image page should simply describe the picture without presuming the context.
"this extra click would be more hassle"? You're kidding. Adam 15:02, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
- No, I'm not; on slow Wikipedia days, clicking a web link can result in a long wait, like 10–20 seconds. If you're doing a lot of work on images (e.g. image tagging), this would be quite a time penalty for the editor. — Matt 15:17, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

contributing your own already published material??

Do people ever post their own already published elsewhere material as wikipedia entries? How are these sort of issues of copyright and authorship dealt with?

If copyright is entirely yours, and you are comfortable with the material you enter becoming GFDL (and free to be edited), there's no problem. If the material is in a contract with someone else, you'll have to ensure all stakeholders are comfortable with this. Radagast 15:59, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

Proposed new VfD rule: No repeat submission of articles

Proposed new VfD rule: No repeat submission of articles that have already passed the VfD process (w/ consensus to keep) within the next three months. Please see the proposal and vote/discuss.

Wiktionary

Please have a look at Driveshaft (and Talk:Driveshaft) and explain to me the rationale for deleting the (apparent) stub. |l'KF'l| 20:16, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

Risk of inappropriate images appearing

I don't know if someone has already experienced the following issue in Wikipedia to date, but let me comment on it, just in case:

As there is no limitation on the uploading of images to Wikipedia, I believe that there is a chance that images that should not appear on any article (among others, pornography, images of disturbing violence, etc.), could get to appear. Even if this type of images appears for no more than an hour before the page is reverted, the damage is already done to those who come in contact with the material.

Is this risk already managed somehow? I would like to read your comments on this.--Logariasmo 04:39, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)

No more than any other risk, I think. Ideally, only one person should come in contact with it - and then they should revert it. --Golbez 04:43, Sep 28, 2004 (UTC)