Cave Canem back online

Gwern Branwen · 08 Aug 2008, 22:52 · from 2008-August.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Fri, 8 Aug 2008 18:52:21 -0400
Subject: (urth) Cave Canem back online
In-Reply-To: <489CAEC3.8010103 at gmail.com>
References: <20080808155833.GA15796@craft> <489CAEC3.8010103 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <20080808225221.GA15052@craft>

On 2008.08.08 14:38:27 -0600, Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com> scribbled 0.6K characters:
> Qwern wrote:
>> Mm. Well, since the license situation is unclear I consider there to be no point in registering and contributing. (Life's a bit too short to hamstring the utility of editing or risk making them useless because of derivative works; especially when there's still a ton of work which could be done on Wikipedia, which has no such issues.)
>>
> I'm about the only active contributor right now other than Mo, though I
> saw a new registration recently. What about the Gnu Free Document
> License? That's what Wikipedia uses, so that would seem to handle your
> objection.

Well, it would handle my objection, yes. But since there is no license in place (or to put it another way, the current license is All Rights Reserved), I would *strongly* recommend *not* using the GFDL. The GFDL has many very bad features which have caused Wikipedia tremendous trouble; Wikipedia's not even using the full GFDL, and we've still invested a lot of effort with Creative Commons and the FSF to get the GFDL updated into something not terrible.

As I said before, I would recommend public-domain/BSD to start off with, for maximum flexibility. And then if contributors wanted to*, use the Creative Commons ShareAlike license (either with or without Attribution, but avoiding NC).

* The primary purpose of using a copyleft license is to prevent people stealing your content and 'closing' it; but honestly, while many people would like to steal and close the Linux kernel, say, I don't really think a small wiki on Wolfeana really needs to worry about that.

--
gwern
Morse Keyhole shbangs SASP jihad watchers NIJ Nerd RCMP 3848
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