On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > Thomas Wood wrote: >> Unverified and somewhat copyrightable sources. > > While I'm not the greatest fan of Wikipedia myself, I think that we > should stop perpetuating such unjustified and unfair criticism. > > Like us, Wikipedia relies on a large user base, and they do a lot to > educate these users about copyright. Their sources are no less > "verified" than ours. They take a different stance on deriving data from > Google et al., but this is just a different interpretation of existing > law than the one we apply. Wikipedia is not encouraging copyright > violation, they have just mapped out a different course through what is > a grey and murky area. > > Our approach is more cautious than Wikipedia's, but that does not make > us "better" or "cleaner", and it would do us all good to respect > Wikipedians' decisions in their realm instead of telling everyone how > they are basically pirates. > >> Where's ShakespeareFan00 when you need him? :) > > That poor guy has been told by some self-important OSMers that Wikimapia > was an unacceptable source, and they somehow forgot to say that this is > just the OSM interpretation. SFan00 dutifully started removing Wikimapia > references from Wikipedia ("they're unacceptable, you know"), and ended > up on the receiving end of a lot of justified Wikipedians' anger. > > Please: Wikimapia, or even Wikipedia or OpenAerialMap may be on the > other side of *our* definition of acceptable, but that does not make > them any less free, or make them second-rate projects. It is time to > bury that childish "but we are cleaner than you" rivalry.
I wouldn't say what they've done is unacceptable and works for them. I just think there's a difference between 1,000,000 wikipedia editors each deriving one point from a copyrighted source and us whole sale importing those 1,000,000 points. Cheers, Adam _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
