Talk:Copyright Policy

Why on Earth would you let people modify your board minutes? That just doesn't make sense. They are a record of what happened at the board meeting - if they are modified, they are no longer the minutes of that board meeting. The same goes for a lot of other publications of the chapter. A blog post stating the chapter's official position on a certain issue, for instance, shouldn't be modified by anyone else because then if wouldn't be the official position.

The introduction to this policy also doesn't make sense - transparency requires that you publish things, it doesn't require that you make them available for re-use. Making content available for re-use, particularly with modifications, is a completely separate issue. --Tango 17:31, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree. Some material needs to be produced in a non-editableform, such as board meetings. We certainly don't want modified copies of board meetings floating around. Dougweller 17:58, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure I agree. Whilst there is clearly little benefit to not having a ND clause in the licensing of minutes aand other "official" documents (beyond the simplicity of having everything under the same license), surely there is also little harm? If you want to fraudulently misrepresent the view of WMUK or its board, you're going to do that anyway: whether you also happen to be infringing an ND licence at the same time is surely not something that would put you off. Jarry1250 18:10, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree wholeheartedly with your second paragraph, Tango: as I said on the mailing list, the harm is publishing private details, not releasing them under a free licence. Copyright licences are not the correct way to ensure Data Protection, nor prevent harm to individuals. Licensing and publication-at-all should be kept as separate issues. Jarry1250 18:10, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I'm a little confused by the concern about our board minutes. We already do publish board meeting minutes on this wiki, and therefore release them in posterity under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and the GFDL for good measure. People even edit them. So that aspect is really codifying the status quo! The Land 18:50, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

That's a good point - this wiki probably shouldn't be completely -SA. I notice wikimediafoundation.org is also CC-BY-SA - that's probably an equally bad idea. We protect pages here that are official and would cause problems if edited (although the minutes don't seem to be protected, which it strange) - them being edited and published elsewhere could also cause problems. There seems to be a feeling among much of our movement that everything should be free, but that really doesn't make sense for everything. Wikipedia is about making encyclopaedic knowledge free - that arguments for that do not apply to the minutes of board meetings... --Tango 19:35, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I suppose we could make a certain category of documents, including minutes, CC-BY-ND. Though there might be potential uses of our minutes that we haven't thought of that would exclude.... The Land 20:14, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I really would prefer it if any minutes pages here were protected so that not just anyone can edit them. Minutes aren't the same as an article or talk page that anyone should be able to edit, they are supposed to be a true record, etc. Dougweller 21:56, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

I agree that minutes on the WMUK site should be protected for the reasons Dougweller gives. But they can stay under CC-BY-SA, I think. Jarry1250 22:43, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

We've not had any problems with people inappropriately editing the minutes in the 3.5 years we've been publishing them here, so there's never really been a pressing need to protect them - plus there's lots of people (including myself) that watch the recent changes very closely and would catch any inappropriate modifications. But if someone wants to protect them, then that would be probably be a good idea and they'd have my thanks. :-) Mike Peel 23:15, 12 February 2012 (UTC)