- Simon Slade

I don’t think the book will be a hit considering people use wikipedia so much because it’s really updated.

We need to utterly revamp our laws regarding Intellectual Property. It’s clear that it’s nearly impossible to apply the old laws fairly or sensibly to new media.

You can make money from it through various means and we certainly encourage you to use the content. Of course, we would prefer if you (or anyone else) did it in the same open fashion we do, for example by releasing software tools under GPL or similar.

In fact, I would love to see an open sourced effort to automatically produce print encyclopedias from Wikipedia content.

Mathias Schindler’s last blog post..Nando Stöcklin im Schweizer Fernsehen

“The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document “free” in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially.”

Terribly hard to understand.

The fact is, anybody can make a book out of the wiki. If you want money from it, go make a book out of it.

Although I do think Michael could possibly have been a little kinder to Mark, it does not come accross to me as “aggressive” and think Mark took these comments a little too harshly, again showing his ignorance of online forums and the consequenses of publishing to them.
You will find ANY forum, blog or wiki site has conditions and rules etc, clearly defined and always made obvious

Its my experience that if you want to “blog” and make accusations in a blog you should be prepared for a certain amount of critisism and may need to get a thicker skin (aimed at Mark, no offence intended buddy)
And also for Mark, I see why you feel this way as a “professional writer”, the system in place for the last few centuries where a writer was protected by copywrite laws and anti-plagerism laws regarding the printed word…welcome to the 21st century my freind.
If you place it on the net, it will be stolen, end of story welcome to the real world
If you VOLUNTARILY place it on a PUBLIC FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA (sorry if that description offends anyone from wiwki) then what royalties could you possibly expect?
Although I do sympathise with you, your mistaken and may have to have your intellegent, mature discussions somewhere other than a blog site, such as at ye olde time writers club rooms at Yale, Oxford Cambridge, wherever the fossils gather and smoke thier pipes

But as for the rest of you, give poor old Mark a break, he had a valid viewpoint he just left himself wide open for some abuse and some people in other blogs (obviously not so well moderated as this one) have really hammered the poor guy when he was only defending his historical turf.
Shame on those who did, shame on you for making us bloggers look aggressive and nasty and not considering this blokes feelings.(Michael being the exception because I see no aggression there just unwillingness to suffer fools)

This reminds me of something straight out of the communist manifesto. The peasant worker-bees do all the hard work to build up the country’s (in this case site’s) infrastructure while the government elites sit around getting rich off of the peasants’ hard work.

The only difference is that in a communist country, the peasants don’t have the choice of whether they wish to perform slave labor or not. Wikipedia’s contributors did so voluntarily and should have known that at some point, their work would be used for commercial gain.

Peter’s last blog post..Against all odds, Schools in New Orleans are Fighting Back

You’re absolutely correct, but I shall leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The facts as I read them are:

(1) A German publisher having no relationship to the Wikipedia Foundation has decided to publish the most popular articles from Wikipedia;

(2) They are taking advantage of the GFDL license in which content provided to Wikipedia is covered; and

(3) They are willing to donate a measly $1 euro to Wikipedia Foundation, in acknowledgement that they they don’t have to do anything but collect and print

Ironically, your arguments, regardless of how ill stated, would be more relevant if the company selected the least popular articles on the site. Why? Because popular articles tend to be the work of any contributors. Meaning you most individuals, even if they were a major contributor to an article may only be able to find a sentence here or a paragraph there; that they wrote unedited. Whereas, most of the unpopular work goes almost unedited.

A Wikipedia volunteer is a contributer not an author; so the issues of authorship are not entirely relevant. But even if they did apply, across the board; the fact is despite knowing or not knowing about the GFDL license; individuals have willingly volunteered to contribute their services.

It’s a bit like volunteering to provide food and clothing for a family on hard times; then demanding your due when they shockingly win the lottery. The family owes you nothing, and its only greed that provides you with certainty that they do. But the issue of ethics that comes up, is one of responsibility, or more specifically social responsibility. For example: If your neighbor gave you a hundred dollars for food, the day you were hungry and broke; but the next day you’re worth $1 million dollars due to unforeseen circumstances. Do you give them back the freely given $100, more, or nothing at all?

License or no license, a volunteered effort is still volunteered. If you want attribution put it on your blog. Participating in Wikipedia is about increasing knowledge in the public domain.

allgood2′s last blog post..In Love with Open Source Food

Before you contribute any content, you must agree to have your work published under the GDFL license. Which allows derivative works, such as this book, to be created.

License:

All text in Wikipedia is covered by GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), a copyleft license permitting the redistribution, creation of derivative works, and commercial use of content while authors retain copyright of their work.[84] The position that Wikipedia is a merely a hosting service has been successfully used as a defense in court.[85][86] Wikipedia has been working on the switch to Creative Commons licenses because the GFDL, initially designed for software manuals, is not suitable for online reference works and because the two licenses are currently incompatible.[87]