A major German publisher is preparing to print a one volume “encyclopedic yearbook” of popular Wikipedia articles in September. The book will cost 19.95 euros, with 1 euro of each sale going back to Wikipedia. This is a questionable move, as there are no plans to compensate the multitudes of volunteers that produce the site. According to the rules of the encyclopedia, this is legal. Content on the site is free for use as long as you credit Wikipedia as the source.
Fair use of free content? We’re still mulling it over.
Read Write Web: Wikipedia Gets Published - Should Writers Get Paid?
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First off, all contributors to Wikipedia agreed to have their work licensed under the GNU FDL. There’s nothing legally fishy about publishing it. It’s not because of some loophole; the license is deliberately designed so that it can be used commercially. They aren’t even obliged to give any money at all to Wikimedia and the fact that they are is very commendable. This is exactly what OS X does with Free BSD by the way (except they give much less back to Free BSD).
There’s a difference between free and Free; I think that the major contributors to Wikipedia know this. If you’re confused about it then you should read: http://www.debian.org/intro/free
May 7th, 2008 at 10:56 am
You completely misunderstand Wikipedia. All editors of Wikipedia agree to have their work licensed under the GFDL, and this is not revocable. As such, anyone is free to do what this publisher is doing, and why not? Why should volunteering individuals like myself be paid?
Please, learn what you are talking about before you comment on this.
May 7th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
PSFK are reporting this story without paying either the publisher or Wikipedia.
Oh noes!
Twats.
May 7th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I’ve done a lot of reading on Wikipedia recently on tech issues, trying to get myself up to speed and my concern is not intellectual property rights but quality of work. While about half of entries were clear and coherent, some of them are written in remedial English and others are too technical to be understood by anyone but a computer programmer or electrical engineer (basically a string of abbreviations). I’ve seen some patently inaccurate or misleading information included in entries. I can’t believe someone would publish Wikipedia entries “as is” as they severely need a thorough copy editing at the least. I’m not ever an uptight grammarian, I just know that a sentence that begins with “If” needs a “then” (a conclusion) and not to just pause midway and end (without even a period). There are some decent contributors but without quality control, it would be a disaster to publish it.
May 8th, 2008 at 11:11 am