User:Zyephyrus/edit3

Problèmes de droits

118 educational comics offered to Wikipedia
Jean-Pierre Petit is a 69 year old french scientist well known in France not only for his work but also for a large set of didactical comics (see his bibliography on the french WP: everything but the "Livres" section are comics) that used to be sold in book stores until recently. These comics cover many (mostly scientific) topics and usually get to concepts studied in colleges and universities. See The silence barrier for example.

Some years ago, when his contract with his publisher ended, he chose to offer these books for free download on the internet and gathered a (still growing) team who does a great job at translating these comics in as many languages as they can. As of today, on his website Knowledge without borders, 22 comics are offered for free download in 22 languages (select a flag) totalizing 118 books. BTW, for whoever is interested, these comics are also available in "textless" version for everyone volunteering to translate them

A couple of days ago, he discovered Wikipedia and liked it (who doesn't ? ;-). He then wrote a message (here is a backup) on the Help Desk, proposing to give away all those comics so that they can be placed on Wikipedia, offering « scientific knowledge to as many people as possible ». Great !

Problems :
 * Some of these books were sold in book stores, and only the french version afaik. Some were not published because they were written after his contract ended. Therefore, I don't know if these comics should go to wikisource or wikibooks (that's why I'm writing this message on both projects, btw)
 * 118 books in 22 languages make a lot of tedious operations : registering on the appropriate wiki project, uploading, making cross-links to translated books, etc. It's even possible that there be no wikisource/wikibooks project for some of the 22 languages
 * JP Petit is not familiar at all with Wikipedia : the culture, the syntax, the licenses, how it works, what goes where, and so on.

My opinion is that he has many other things to do than to learn all these concepts and he would appreciate a strong coaching. Even better : if someone very familiar with Wikipedia could do the job on his behalf (uploading every file to the right place, adding the appropriate license, descriptions, crosslinks, ...), I'm sure it would spare him a lot of discouraging troubles. If you wonder, no, I can not be this hero (I don't know wikisource/wikibooks and I miss the time) but, if necessary, I could play as a mediator since I'm french and I have a fair grasp of wikipedia culture.

I hope his offer will interest you. Regards. — Xavier, 04:09, 19 August 2006 (UTC) (PS: JP Petit doesn't know me, I'm writing this on my own just because I support his idea of "Knowledge without borders")


 * Hello. Any of the works which have been verifiably published are sought-after on Wikisource; others should probably be uploaded to Wikibooks, if the community there is interested. The publication requirement goes for any language; if it's been published in French but not English, the translation would be appropriate here. Although I don't have enough time to add any texts myself, I'm willing to help any new user who'd like to add texts; they just need to add one and contact me, and I'll make any necessary changes with explanations. // [ admin ] Pathoschild (talk/map) 04:19, 19 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Hello. Your help will be greatly appreciated, thank you. What you wrote raises several questions :
 * For each language, JP Petit will have to open an account on the corresponding wikisource and/or wikibook website, right ? I'm pretty sure he doesn't speak Polish for example. How will he be able to upload those comics on http://pl.wikisource.org/ ? How will he manage to get help there since everything is written in Polish ?
 * Similarily, some books are written in Laotian or Kinyarwanda. However, according to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikisource it seems that there is no wikisource project for these languages. Should these books be forgotten ?
 * The comics that were not sold in book stores were published on the Internet nevertheless, and would certainly have been sold as is 20 years ago. I'm not discussing your policy, I understand the reasons why you must enforce it, but let me make a parallel : several years ago, Stephen King wrote a book that was published exclusively on the internet. If SK decided to put all his books it in the public domain, this particular online book wouldn't go in wikisource, really ? I ask because splitting these books between wikisource and wikibooks adds another level of complexity.
 * Thanks in advance for enlightening me on these issues. — Xavier, 16:02, 19 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Any reason for not uploading at Commons? Anyway, if him upload something to Portuguese Wikisource all images maybe get deleted and re-uploaded to Commons, per policy. Lugusto 555 05:49, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

(←)The main problem I find with works (which I think are quite desirable for WS) is that they are currently released under a non-comercial license. This is an unacceptable license per our copyright policy. It is simply too restrictive for the goals of this project regarding promoting free (free as in Freedom, not as in beer!) knowledge. The Wikimedia Foundation, which Wikisource is a part of, relys on copyleft licenses to ensure the the downstream freedom of the work done at Wikipedia and other sister projects. I do not know how many people have worked on the translations or if it would be possible to get them to release their work under a different license even if the original author is interested in doing so. I do think it is worth the effort to try and explain the big picture of our stance on this issue to him. I can ask some of our French collaborators to contact him and make a case for this if you would like. --BirgitteSB 13:54, 20 August 2006 (UTC)