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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>
  • To: Chitu Okoli <Chitu.Okoli AT concordia.ca>
  • Cc: "AcaWiki general \(listserv\)" <acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [acawiki-general] Proposal: AcaWiki to BY-SA
  • Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:38:55 -0700

On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Chitu Okoli <Chitu.Okoli AT concordia.ca> wrote:
Mike, you asked me to comment on your proposal, but in fact you included a number of distinct items in the post:

1. "This is do-able, though adding a licensing field to the summary form is annoying: boring and confusing for any contributor who don't already care too much."

I don't see why this would be annoying, boring or confusing. Contributors who don't care would probably just ignore it just like they ignore all the other default copyright wording in the submission form. Contributors who do care would appreciate it.

My intuition is its one thing to ignore verbiage, but another to ignore an actual field -- requires more thought, leading to lower retention.  But I don't have any data to back it up, so nevermind.
 
SJ's suggestion of letting users set their preferred licensing defaults sounds good at first, but it might have some unintended long-term consequences. In effect, user defaults would only work if they result in more restrictive licenses:
* User default CC0 would only work on new pages created by that user, or pages that are already CC0. For BY and BY-SA pages, it would have no effect.
* User default CC-BY would upgrade CC0 pages they work on to CC-BY, For CC-BY-SA pages, it would have no effect.
* User default CC-BY-SA would upgrade any page they work on to CC-BY-SA.

I think it can be surmised that the long-term effect of letting users set their default license preference would be that the vast majority of articles would become BY-SA (e.g. user with BY-SA default corrects a typo on a BY article: article switches to BY-SA). Thus, if there is the desire that as many articles as possible in the repository be BY, then it might not be a good idea to make it so easy to specify BY-SA. Perhaps it would be better to require users to make that explicit choice every time they edit an article that is not already BY-SA.


I think each edit is the only short term option anyway; integration with preference would require programming.
 

2. "But if we're going to have such a field, I demand a CC0 option. :)"

This is a distinct discussion--whether to add CC0 as an alternative option.

Ok. Any objections?
 
3. "We might also use this juncture to clarify that all metadata (such as bibliographic info and categories) is public domain, explicitly CC0 going forward. We should do that no matter what, right?"

I agree that making metadata explicitly CC0 would be a good idea.

Great.
 
4. "Ochado, would implementation of the above proposal un-prevent you from contributing going forward?"

I assume that this question refers to point #3 above. My principle here is that since the metadata is not an original contribution by any of the AcaWiki contributors (unless the author or publisher of the article contributes to AcaWiki), then it is only fair to release such data as CC0. My personal preference for CC-BY-SA is in regard to my own original contributions.

Yes, apologies, copied and pasted from the wiki, should have switched from your username to name for mailing list. Anyway, glad this would work for you.
 
5. "Do you think that would be the case for others demanding copyleft?"

I honestly cannot speak for anyone else :-)

:-)
 
Thanks,
Mike




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