OrthodoxWiki talk:Copyrights

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Lack of Authorship/Editorship Information in Encyclopedic Wiki Entries

All what one finds in wikis are IP addresses and nicknames. The lack of clear and complete authorship/editorship information attached to each entry, including authors/editors' affiliations and credentials, is a very serious quality issue encountered in most wiki-based encyclopedias these days (not just OrthodoxWiki). There are no built-in wiki mechanisms or policies to enforce the presence of such metainformation in every article.

Problem with Citations

Citing a wiki page in your work can also be very tricky (unless one uses the new 'permanent link' feature in MediaWiki to point to a specific revision of that page). A page might significantly change and become a totally different article than the one you were originally referring to (while still maintaining the same URI).

Some Related Links

From User:Arbible

Re:

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, they explicitly state "a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement" (wikipedia:Wikipedia:Copyright). I think we should adopt the same explicit policy (and to this end, the "click through" language has recently been revised. I agree about the permalinks -- that's why I'm now recommending that the link to the original article go to the version permalink rather than the article itself (although I'm not requiring it since Wikipedia does not require it for compliance).

As far as OrthodoxWiki is concerned, we don't have the issue with IP addresses. Besides this, an author is free to give as much or as little information about themselves as they wish (on their user page). There is more discussion of this at Help:Citing OrthodoxWiki - please feel free to comment there too. Thanks, — FrJohn (talk)

Just to confirm - does OrthodoxWiki have the same stipulation as Wikipedia, ie that OrthodoxWiki must be referenced in quotes and borrowed articles? — sτévο, at 22:48, May 31, 2006 (CDT)
Yes, I believe this is the case, Pistevo. --J. J. 15:32, August 17, 2006 (CDT)
Indeed - it's required by both the GFDL and the CC by-sa licenses we use. — FrJohn (talk)

CC footer misleading

Until I noticed your multimedia announcement today, I hadn't realized that OrthodoxWiki ran under dual licensing. Maybe it would be best to remove the CC image from the footer and replace it with plain text, like "GFDL-CC licensed"—or just remove the image and leave the "Copyright Information" link as-is in the footer. --J. J. 15:32, August 17, 2006 (CDT)

I think this would be a good idea, actually, especially considering that the consensus over at Wikipedia finds our dual license incompatible with their single one (which would allow material to be brought from there to here, but not here to there).[1]. I've updated the text on this article to make this incompatibility more explicit. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs 14:30, April 24, 2007 (PDT)
Yeah, I agree about this too. It would be nice to have an image with both... let me see what I can do. — FrJohn (talk)
I've updated the copyright image at the bottom of each page, on each localization (except the BG site, which has to be done separately) to better reflect our policy. — FrJohn (talk)

Exporting to Wikipedia

I noted that FrJohn weighed in over at Wikipedia stating that material from here could indeed go there.[2] That's of course conflicting with the clarifications I added to this page. I changed it the way I did because of the "both/and" language used throughout rather than the single "either/or" used in Template:Defaultcopy.

It's now not clear to me what the clarification should be, since the "both/and" language seems essentially incompatible with Wikipedia's GFDL-only policy. If we instead choose to opt for the "either/or" which Fr. John's comment on Wikipedia advocated, then we run the risk of having done a bait-and-switch on our licensing: folks contributed thinking that they were issuing their edits under a truly dual license, when they could in fact have been issuing them under either one or the other.

I'm honestly of the opinion that the dual license makes us compatible with WP in only one direction: from there to here. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs 14:50, April 24, 2007 (PDT)

Okay, it seems that I was wrong in interpreting dual licensing as "both/and" rather than "either/or" (mainly because much of the language in this article used that kind of wording). I've adjusted this article to make the "either/or" language more explicit and consistent. —Fr. Andrew talk contribs 15:24, April 24, 2007 (PDT)
Hi all, it's not a question of "bait and switch" at all, though I see how this could be confusing. There is, however, a clear context and background for what "dual licensing" and the reasons it was adopted. I probably should've explained this better, although I guess I just had in my head all of the terminology used by the more technical articles I looked at... In any case, it's not a question of us chooisng one interpretation or the other -- it's that using this type of dual license has always implied "either/or" rather than "both/and". — FrJohn (talk)
ro.OrthodoxWiki.org started, few months ago, with a group of editors from the OrtodoxRoNet romanian orthodox webmasters association. Some of us hesitated, at this time, to enter (or to use our energies) in this project here, arguing that is more important to focus on the Wikipedia project, in order to "preach" or to create visibility for the Orthodoxy on WP, because of the large number of visitors there. Finally, we concluded that the two projects are complementary and we voluntary use articles in this two directions: WP->OW and OW-WP, with the necessaries adaptations. And I think this is very important. - Inistea 16:52, April 24, 2007 (PDT)
I agree with you, Fr. Julian, and am grateful for your work. There are helpful things which are appropriate for OrthodoxWiki but not for Wikipedia and also the reverse. — FrJohn (talk)
According to this version of the copyrights page, it seems that OrthodoxWiki used to use CC by-sa as the default license, not CC by-nc-sa as the current page says. Is there something I'm missing? Obviously, this is pretty important: in my view (as a Wikipedia admin & user familiar with copyrights there), it's okay to reuse material there licensed under the CC by-sa license, but not the CC by-nc-sa. CC by-sa is not the same as the GFDL, but they are similar, in that the GFDL doesn't add any restrictions incompatible with the freedoms in CC by-sa, and that the GFDL maintains all the restrictions required by CC by-sa. CC by-nc-sa, however, is a different story. Is there a reason for the change? It happened right around when the licensing policy was changed to the current dual-license thing. Mangojuice 06:50, April 25, 2007 (PDT)
Hi MangoJuice, good to see you here too. You've made a good catch and it took me a moment to figure it out. The problem is that the Template:Cc page was updated (check out its history). Sadly, were were using by-sa-nc prior to November 2005. We made the changes exactly for the reasons you mentioned. Hope that helps! — FrJohn (talk)
P.S. I've created a template to mark this earlier content at Template:Prerevised. — FrJohn (talk)
Okay, i think I've answered my own question. What really matters is MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning, because it wasn't until 11/22/05 that the warning referred to OrthodoxWiki:Copyrights for the copyright policy, and before that, the copyright warning did specify CC by-nc-sa 2.0. That copyrightwarning is the text everyone sees when they submit, so it holds the actual agreement. Mangojuice 07:13, April 25, 2007 (PDT)
Yep, that's a good indicator too. Nice detective work. — FrJohn (talk)
Thanks all for weighing in over at wikipedia and helping us to sort this all out. Your helpfulness is greatly appreciated. -- Pastordavid 09:15, April 25, 2007 (PDT)
Glad we were able to get things somewhat smoothed out. Thanks for your work! — FrJohn (talk) 09:20, April 25, 2007 (PDT)

Republishing by the author himself

Hi all, I just registered to the greek version and was reading the respective copyrights page in greek. I guess these pages should be exact translations of eachother on all OrthodoxWikis, so I propose here one small change for purposes of clarification. The text says "...and authors remain free to re-issue their own work under any other license they choose". It might be better to clarify that they remain free to re-issue their own work under any other non-exclusive license (or else they would be revoking this already existing one, which they can't do). By submitting here they waive their right to grant exclusive licenses to anybody in the future. This may be of interest to authors who would like to publish their work later with publishers who require exclusive licenses. No big deal - just since the page is in my opinion very well written, this clarification would make things even better. --Αρχίδαμος 11:37, July 23, 2007 (PDT)

Thanks, Αρχίδαμος. You've got a good point there - I'll add a note to the text. In time, we'll be synthesizing these on Meta, but for now, this is a good start. In Christ, — FrJohn (talk) 20:34, July 27, 2007 (PDT)