User talk:Musikfabrik/archive 1
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[edit] Discussion page from Talk:Paul Wehage prior to deletion
I own the copyright to this text. As the copyright owner, I posted this article freely and do not consider this as copyright infringement
- Thank you, but we need more than this kind of statement from an anonymous IP editor. As a minimum, we will need an official way to contact you and verify that (a) you are, indeed, the copyright holder, and that (b) you are releasing it to the Wikimedia Foundation under the GFDL terms. Until such time, we will have to leave this tagged as a possible infringement. Please consult WP:CP for more details. Thank you. Owen× ☎ 23:18, 1 November 2005 (UTC)
contact me at musik.fabrik@chello.fr My username here is Musikfabrik. I don't understand why this is coming up as an anonymous IP editor. I am a music publisher. I have been asked by a number of my composers to upload biographies to your site in a number of languages. These are all published either on our site http://www.classicalmusicnow.com/ or on their own sites, an example of which is http://www.paulwehage.com/
Your article on Germaine Tailleferre contains a number of phrases that were directly lifted from the page http://www.classicalmusicnow.com/Tailleferrebiography.htm but which didn't bother us, since our objectives are to get the information out to the public. While it was irritating to see our text used by someone else, it was more important to us that the information which we provided as a unique source was provided in another venue.
It is even more irritating see that text for which we hold the copyright and which we are chosing to publish here is being held back as a copyright violation.
If you were copying our music, we would have a problem. We want you to copy this text...
[edit] Discussion page from Talk:Gian Paolo Chiti prior to deletion
I own the copyright of this text : username Musikfabrik email musik.fabrik@chello.fr
- This text was also found on the talk pages of Jean-Thierry Boisseau and Carson Cooman. --HappyCamper 02:02, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] OwenX's reply
Dear Sir,
As I have explained before, the fact that you are indeed the copyright holder for the text in the articles you posted here does not give you the automatic right to post it here. Wikipedia is not your private Web host; it is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation for a specific usage under the GFDL license. Under these rules, any text copied from a copyrighted source must be proven to have been licensed to us.
The text you copied in the Paul Wehage article you posted, for example, was copied from a web page which claims it is "Copyright 2005 paulwehage.com". Do you represent or own this legal entity? If a lawyer representing paulwehage.com shows up tomorrow with a court order, do you expect me to say, "But hey--I got permission from someone with the email address 'musik.fabrik@chello.fr'!"?
I marked the material you posted as copyrighted material according to Wikipedia policy because it is copyrighted material; period. It takes time and effort to find out who really holds the copyright, and whether or not we can use it under the GFDL license. In the meantime, the articles must stay tagged, for our legal protection. If this is not acceptable to you, feel free to remove the text you posted or to stop posting copyrighted material.
Please keep in mind that even if the copyright issue is settled, there is still a fair chance some or most of the content of your articles will be changed or removed by other editors. Wikipedia frowns on advertising, and it is likely these articles will be rewritten to conform to a more neutral point of view. I appreciate the fact that you are doing this in an attempt to promote and support these struggling musicians, but an encyclopedia may not be the best place to do that.
Regards,
Owen× ☎ 01:37, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Deletion of articles
Dear Musikfabrik,
There are a number of outstanding issues which I would like to take this opportunity to resolve. As OwenX outlined above, being the owner of text that is copyrighted is not a prerequisite for adding that text to Wikipedia. For example, there are certain types of material which are incompatible with goals of this encyclopedia, some of which are listed here.
If you consider the content on Germaine Tailleferre to be in violation of your copyright, you are free to immediately report this to here. If this is the case, I would kindly request that you do so as soon as possible - procedures will be followed to remove the offending content in an expedited fashion. However, if you wish to have your text replicated and edited in perpetuity on Wikipedia, it must be indicated as GFDL compatible from the source.
The pages Gian Paolo Chiti, Paul Wehage, Jean-Thierry Boisseau, and Carson Cooman which you created have been deleted from Wikipedia. This is because the material came from a source which was marked as copyrighted, and were less than 48 hours old. Content that is submitted to Wikipedia must be fully compliant with the GFDL. Assuming you are the copyright owner of that text, you must agree to release the text into the GFDL license and mark the content as such so that there is no ambiguity regarding the text licensing.
As Wikipedia is primarily intended to be an encyclopedia, please do not contribute material which can be construed as fulfilling promotional purposes, commercial solicitation, or otherwise. Such material is incompatible with Wikipedia. I would respectfully request that you inform the composers who have requested you to upload their biographical information to Wikipedia that they consider an alternative mechanism for promoting public awareness of their works or otherwise. You are however most welcome to contribute GFDL compatible content regarding those composers, but keep in mind that Wikipedia has guidelines on notability, and should the community at large determine that those articles fail the prerequisites outlined, its content will also be deleted. The discussion regarding the decision to remove that material remains on Wikipedia. This is presented here encourage future compliance with the Wikipedia's contribution guidelines.
Finally, if you can substantiate that the material you submitted is acceptable for Wikipedia, I will undelete the page and allow you to proceed with editing that page in another namespace within a predetermined timeframe so that all copyright issues are thoroughly resolved, after which the article will be moved back into the main article namespace. If you have further questions regarding the appropriateness or acceptability of contributions to Wikipedia, please let me know either on your talk page, or on my talk page. Both will be actively monitored. Thanks for your understanding. --HC 02:53, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Musikfabrik's reply
So, you're saying that my work with the Estate of Germaine Tailleferre, with Jean Françaix, with Antoine Tisné, with Gian Paolo Chiti, with other known figures of French, American and other known figures of musical and literary history (Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Paul Claudel etc etc etc) is a vanity project which I am using to generate commercial awareness for products that I'm selling? If you refuse to print biographical notices for every author/composer/artist/actor/etc who has products for sale, you're not going to have many left.
When asked why she wrote music, Germaine Tailleferre replied immediately "For money, of course". Writing music is our job. We get paid to do it. "Vissi d'Arte, Vissi D'Amore" makes a great aria for Tosca to sing, but the reality is that musicians get paid to do their jobs. Do you think that John Adams works for free? You didn't refuse his article, nor those of any number of other lesser known figures.
The main question is what constitutes an ad and what constitutes a normal biographical sketch? Does it have to do with whether you "know" the person? Does it have to do with how the media has lead you and others to believe that certain people, who are attached to certain institutions and publishing houses etc are somehow more important than others?
I think that perhaps you might want to know that Gian Paolo Chiti's wife ,Patricia Adkins-Chiti, is Vice-president of the International Music Council at UNESCO and she's not going to be very happy to know that her husband's biographical material was deleted because you're considering it to be some form of digital panhandling. She was the one who asked me to post these pages here in the first place and is certainly not going to be happy that your community considers a biographical sketch about her husband's work (who wrote film music for Carlo Ponti, is the vice-rector of the Academia Santa Cecilia in Rome and works on a number of Italian governmental agencies for music and dance...obviously a lowdown spammer who's just exploiting your system to try to fill up pages with his vanity comments) to be a glorified ad. It's not as if he's ever been on the American Top 40 or anything, huh? I suppose that article in Groves doesn't count either...
Second of all, of course we were willing to give our copyrighted texts to your foundation for free use and editing. However, we've spent a LONG time writing biographies for everyone in SEVERAL different languages. We also have to write programme notes in multiple languages, presentation pages on projects and....write music. We're not going to rewrite them, since we have other things to do and they represent quite a lot of work already. And finally, the point of this was to "open" this work up to others (former students, colleagues etc) to be able to add other information as a way of documenting these composers, who are all quite well-established and extremely well-known in their professions. These are people who have done things which are already documented in other academic sources such as doctoral thesis, academic publications, recordings, books and many other venues. Our texts were meant to be the beginning of the process, not fixed commercial displays. Musicology begins by documenting today, and part of our job is doing just that.
I fail to see what this has to be such an unpleasant experience, other than an excess of zeal on the part of your friend Mr OwenX who seems to delight in his role of court censor, as his own page so clearly states.....I am not a party crasher by nature, so if you don't wish to see me here, nor see this content here, by all means say so and it will all disappear. Musikfabrik 11:44, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] It's funny that you should be telling people in France what an encyclopdia is....
Um, I had several discussions about this today with a number of different people, and if you are indeed making an "encyclopedia", there is no excuse for excluding knowledge out of that structure because of your personal judgements as to the worth or importance of the knowledge.
The whole point of the encyclopédistes was to destroy the hierarchy of knowledge that had been put in place because of the pressure of the State and Rome. In a true encyclopedia, nothing is graded by importance and nothing is censored, since the goal is universal knowledge.
If you're doing something else, then by all means, say so. If you are making an encyclopedia, then why are you excluding knowledge based on judgements about importance and hierarchy?
...of course, this could also be about people using power to hold things back because they have nothing better to do and nothing to say themselves. If this is the case, this isn't an encyclopedia.
Musikfabrik 17:41, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Responses
Dear Musikfabrik:
The primary issue that is outstanding at the moment is not so much whether these people are notable or not, but as I understand it, that you are insisting on submitting works that are marked as copyright to Wikipedia - which it cannot accept. However, if you are willing to mark the original source of the text as GFDL, then there is no problem. Text that is released to the GFDL are not revokable, and if your livelihood depends on those documents, then Wikipedia does not appear to be the proper venue to submit them.
The questions regarding "notability" are second priority if the text written about them is copyrighted. Notability is something which is generally decided by the community when an article is placed up for deletion at WP:AFD. Frankly, it is in my opinion that the articles that you submitted would likely survive a deletion process - but it would definitely not stand if it is copyrighted material.
What I can do for you is the following: If you insist that the 4 articles as they stand should be included in Wikipedia, then I will undelete the 4 articles for you. However, as I know that they are from a copyrighted source, I cannot in good conscience allow them to remain on the servers - so as a compromise, I will simultaneously submit them for deletion consideration by the community.
As a more constructive alternative, the facts you have written on this talk page alone would likely be appropriate for an article, and you may want to expend some effort in formulating an entirely new article about them. Perhaps as a first attempt something like:
- Gian Paolo is an instrumentalist from XYZ in the country ABC. His music background includes A, B, and C, and his contributions to contemporary music include D, E and F. The cultural significance of his contributions include G, H, I. Chiti's wife, Patricia Adkins-Chiti, is Vice-president of the International Music Council at UNESCO....
The bottom line is the following: Copyrighted material, regardless of who wrote it, or what it is about is thoroughly unacceptable on Wikipedia. However, you are welcome to write GFDL articles on anything you wish - and if it is written well, neutrally, and objectively, it will remain on Wikipedia. --HC 13:51, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] This is ridiculous
First of all, you are not consistent. The primary focus of your first comment was "you are using our service as a way of advertizing your music". What do you think Robert Schumann was doing in the 19th century. Music History is nothing more than one big ad for one movement or the other. You need to figure out more about the World and how things work before you start making the sort of pronouncements you've made. And please don't forget that even if you don't know who these people are, that doesn't necessarily mean that they aren't important figures.....
Secondly, I OWN THE COPYRIGHT TO THE ARTICLES. I can do what I want with them. The fact that I, as copyright holder, am posting them here should be clear enough as what my intentions are. Your procedure to "undelete" and at the same time present them for consideration for deletion is a burocratic waste of time.
Don't you people have anything else to do? I would think that someone who was so terribly concerned with academic issues would have SOMETHING to research, beside how long you can split hairs because of the power trip that you're on?
Either the texts are acceptable on a copyright basis or they're not. Since I am the copyright holder, only I can make that judgement. Please don't exercise my rights as copyright holder in my place. That's the whole point of copyright. What do you think the term means?
The reason that I would like these texts to be presented here is because this is how the composers have chosen to be presented themselves. As they control the moral rights over their work, they have the right to choose how they are presented. Do you understand the concept of moral rights?
Finally, I am a published author, composer and I work with some of the most important figures in musicology today. Please don't presume to give me advice on style, objectivity or anything else, unless you can prove something. Either ALL of my information is acceptable or none of it is acceptable.
The aim of the encyclopedists was to present a universal view of knowledge without hierarchy of importance in order to break the established orders of knowledge. By behaving in this manner, you've just suceeded in undoing all of their work simply because you don't understand exactly WHY these texts are important. Or perhaps you're saying that you've got a better idea of the idea of an encyclopedia than the encyclopedists themselves?
[edit] A misunderstanding
*sigh* - a misunderstanding. I didn't realize you recreated new versions of Gian Paolo Chiti, Paul Wehage, Carson Cooman, Jean-Thierry Boisseau on the 3rd. I assume you thought my response on the 5th was related to your new versions of these pages, when in fact I was referring to the deleted ones. Yes, these can stay on Wikipedia - the content in them is completely distinct from their copyrighted originals [1], [2], [3], and [4], and these are thoroughly acceptable and welcome. Thanks for rewriting them. --HC 02:28, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] My comments weren't about those rewrites
Efectively, by censoring texts are under my copyright which I am freely releasing to this service and which have been approved by the composers themselves who hold the moral rights to their image and how it is presented, you are effectively diminishing the amount of knowledge available.
In doing so, you are defeating the entire idea of what an encyclopedia is, at least in terms of what that word means in Europe. It is not clear at all what your objectives are, but it seems quite clear that this is more about your own use of power to somehow shape the way material is presented than this is about the presentation of any body of knowledge.
Your comments about judging the importance or reputation of the subjects in the articles is completely out of the context of an encyclopedia.
I still believe that if, as copyright holder, I give you my permission to use these texts, this should clarify the situation completely and they should be usable. By repeatedly refusing to allow me exercise my rights as copyright holder to use these texts as I please, you are supplanting the use of these rights which only I, as copyright holder, can exercise. Please try to remember that copyright can be withheld, but can also be granted and only the copyright holder is apt to either withhold or grant the use of his property.
The suggestion that you deblock them and submit them for some sort of deletion process at the same time ("in good conciousness..."?) is patently ridiculous. Either the information is acceptable or it is not. If there are no copyright violations, the texts, which present descriptions of important musical events which are not documented elsewhere, should be welcomed. Unless, of course, this is an issue of your own personal power to create and delete at will, in which case this is not an encyclopedia, but rather a "selection" of works which have been judged important by a selected group of individuals. Is this an encyclopedia or is it not? That is the question.
It so happens that I gave a performance yesterday in the largest library in France and had a discussion of this situation with the Library director. This is situation is being closely monitored by a large number of intellectuals in Europe. Whether you decide to follow your current policy of censorship or whether you decide to allow these texts to be used in the interests of collecting knowledge might be an issue that you wish to consider with a bit more objectivity than you have demonstrated in some of your comments above...Musikfabrik 12:54, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Another response
Dear Musikfabrik,
This is a rather long response, and I hope you will get a chance to read it entirely. It contains a lot of information, and I hope it would help clear up everything. I get the impression that it may be necessary for me to place this in a clearer context. You have to recognize what an "administrator" entails on Wikipedia. In fact, there are literally hundereds of us, all listed here. You can contact any one of them to help you - it just so happens that I chanced upon your talk page one day, and did what I thought was best and according to best, established practices on Wikipedia. I have no special authority over anyone on Wikipedia, and in fact, any of the administrators can undo anything that I do. Granted, I became an administrator after contributing content and articles, one of which was nondimensionalization, and the reference desk. Writing articles is something that I'd gladly return to. I am a volunteer on Wikipedia, and I do not represent the encyclopedia in any official capacity. As an administrator, I have a few extra features attached to my account - page protection, deletion, and blocking. This is it - and let me tell you that I use these features very sparingly. I do not take it lightly when I am accused of misusing them, and when it occurs, I'd like to get to the bottom of it.
<begin sharpness> Let me apologize in advance for the potential sharpness of the next few sentences (it will only be in this paragraph), but your previous responses struck at something of my character that I refuse to swallow. If you look at my user page, nowhere do I even assert that I am an administrator. I deliberately do this to emphasize that I am not above anyone else on Wikipedia, and I am certainly not above you, or any of the contributors that are here. Don't you even dare insinuate that I feel this way. </end sharpness>
Like all regular contributors to Wikipedia, I am a volunteer - a dedicated volunteer who feels it is his duty and responsibility to explain myself as best I can. Everything I do here is done with the best of intentions for Wikipedia - and of course, based on my understanding of how things run around here. When I deal with potential copyright issues on Wikipedia, the only thing I assert on Wikipedia's behalf is that it insists on submissions that is compatible with the GFDL. I assume that the focus of this discussion now is the rationale behind the initial deletion of your articles, your thorough dissatisfaction of my deleting them, and the perception that I have misused my capability to delete content. To the best of my ability, this is the response I have for you below:
The initial deletion of your 4 articles was absolutely not an attempt to censor information on Wikipedia. They were deleted based on the instructions here. In particular, it states:
- If an article and all its revisions are unquestionably copied from the website of a commercial content provider and there is no assertion of permission, ownership or fair use and none seems likely, and the article is less than 48 hours old, it may be speedily deleted. See CSD A8 for full conditions.
- Note: In general, copyright exists automatically, upon publication: an author does not need to apply for or even claim copyright for a copyright to exist. Only an explicit statement that the material is public domain or available under the GFDL makes material useable, unless it is inherently free of copyright due to its age or source.
And of course, the reference to "CSD A8" states
- An article that is a blatant copyright infringement and meets these parameters:
- Material is unquestionably copied from the website of a commercial content provider (e.g. encyclopedia, news service) and;
- The article and its entire history contains only copyright violation material, excluding tags, templates, and minor edits and;
- Uploader makes no assertion of permission or fair use, and none seems likely and;
- The material is identified within 48 hours of upload and is almost or totally un-wikified (to diminish mirror problem).
Let me take for example, one of your initial submissions: Jean-Thierry Boisseau, which contained 3 paragraphs of information from http://www.classicalmusicnow.com/jtbenglish.htm . The content was a cut-and-paste of the content from that page. It was unquestionably copied from a commercial content provider, and any well reasoned person would be inclined to conclude this is the case because it was a page which listed various products and services being sold at different prices at the bottom. Finally, the article was uploaded within 48 hours of my deletion of it - and in fact, it was completely unwikified. This meant that it did not contain any Wikipedia syntax, and further supports the notion that it was a cut-and-paste of online content.
The only grey area where I made a judgement call was on the 3rd bullet - you repeatedly asserted you owned the copyright, but you did not assert "permission or fair use" for Wikipedia. That is to say, none of your contributions on Wikipedia to date explicitly stated to the effect: "I am the owner of these copyright articles - so that it can be distributed on Wikipedia I freely allow anyone to use the text for whatever purpose, release it into the GFDL, or into the public domain from this point forward.
In other words, I felt that your statements regarding your initial contributions to your 4 articles did not satisfy the prerequisites prescribed by the notes above: "Only an explicit statement that the material is public domain or available under the GFDL makes material useable". To date, you have not even typed the phrases "GFDL" or "public domain", and so I find very little indication of evidence that your initial contributions were compatible with Wikipedia. It is extremely important for Wikipedia to know without ambiguity that material is compatibile with the GFDL or the public domain. Some of the reasons, but not limited to these are below:
- Material on Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. Suppose hypothetically you submitted your copyrighted text to Wikipedia without our knowledge. Other contributors add material and content and over a period of months, it blossoms into a beautiful article. Months down the road, you change you mind - for whatever reason you don't want the article's content being constantly edited. At this point, you can technically claim that the article is an infringment on your copyright, because the very first edit was copyrighted material. We would either have to delete the page, or comb through the entire page history and selectively remove all the text which was copyrighted. Very often, the entire article would have to be deleted, because GFDL and copyrighted edits would be so intermingled that it would be unclear which text was copyrighted, and which was not. When this happens, it is exceptionally time consuming to process, is drain on the volunteered resources on Wikipedia, and would have been a waste of all the efforts of well meaning editors who unknowingly edited your initially copyrighted content. For this reason, Wikipedia insists that content is compatible with the GFDL from the onset so that this problem does not occur.
- Of course, it may seem absolutely absurd to suggest that if you had the good and genuine intention of releasing it on Wikipedia that you would want to revoke its distribution later. Let me tell you that there have been cases on Wikipedia where person A creates an article B without saying that it was GFDL compatible. Several months down the road, person C noticed that the first version of article B was copyrighted content, after which person C insisted that the article to be deleted on the principle that everything on Wikipedia should be GFDL - even though person C was completely unrelated to person A or the content that person A provided. These are the sorts of liabilities that Wikipedia wants to protect itself from, and hence at the bottom of every article submission screen it asserts various statements about the GFDL and copyrights.
- Content on Wikipedia is also distributed to a number of other mirror sites, and will also appear on commercial sites, such as http://www.answers.com - to my best knowledge, the best listing of these sites are found here, but this list is incomplete. In principle, when you submit content to Wikipedia, you are also releasing it to thousands of other sites on the internet, some of which you may not be aware of. It is not possible to selectively assert that particular articles stay on Wikipedia, while others are copied to different sites. Wikipedia has no control over what other sites do with our content. However, as the content on Wikipedia is GFDL, it will assert that sites which use Wikipedia content state this to some satisfactory effect.
On the issue of "commercialisation" - I admit that it was thoroughly unnecessary and irrelevant for me to bring it up. I'm sorry - my sincerest apologies. It is a standard statment that I use to differentiate between the editors who use Wikipedia for commercial exploitation, and those academics who genuinely believe in building an encyclopedia. From my experience here, contributors rarely respond if they represent a commercial or coroporate entity - and I have even contacted these companies to verify this in the past. It works 99.9% - and unfortunately, you were the 0.1% of the contributors for which it did not work. I am so sorry. If you really are who you say you are, than Wikipedia is all the better - we are in dire need of experts on music, culture, and the humanities. I would be more than happy to guide you to articles that are in need of attention, and welcome any of your contacts to Wikipedia who have expertise in these fields.
On the issue of deletions and "notability" - I admit that I phrased it with particularly negative connotation, but it was done entirely in good faith and partly because I felt being overwhelmed by your responses and accusations. The best way for any user on Wikipedia to get help is to post something on a heavily visited page, and I certainly felt that way on the 5th. In this case, it was the deletion pages that I felt was most appropriate. The deletion process is one of the most heavily visited pages on Wikipedia and I knew very well that your articles would survive the deletion process. Yes, it absolutely would have been thoroughly absurd to submit those articles to deletion, but the deletion process allows two things to happen:
- It temporarily defers responsibility to the community at large - at the time, I felt there was an urgency to attend to a much more serious incident on Wikipedia which required immediate attention of a user with administrative capabilities.
- I made an exception with your articles and decided to leverage the existing deletion system with the following rationale: Once an article passes through a deletion process, it gains an extra tag at the top of the page which essentially states that the article survived the deletion process, and that it has extensive support from the community that it is noteworthy. The tag makes the article more visible, and encourages more users to edit it, and possible bring it up to featured article status. During the voting process, users generally supply a rationale for keeping or deleting the article. Generally, experienced users of Wikipedia vote on these articles, and it would have been blatantly obvious to them to keep the article. It was this that I wanted to attach to the article, and also, to use the deletion process to leverage more users to visit your contributions and potentially add to it. It was certainly not a malicious attempt on my part to rid the encyclopedia of knowledge of those composers. This, of course, is a subtelty in understanding the system here, which it would have been unlikely for you to know about. Hence, in addition to the above apologies, I am sorry that I even remotely suggested or had the insinuation that information on those 4 composers did not belong here.
Now to summarize: I emphatically state that the initial deletions of your 4 articles was absolutely not an attempt to censure content on Wikipedia. Content on Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and so we need to be absolutely certain that the content is GFDL compatible. Nowhere did you state explicitly that it was compatible with the GFDL - only that you owned the copyright, and that you had the best of intentions of allowing it being placed here. This was simply not sufficient by the italicised standards summarized above. As the guidelines on Wikipedia stipulate: Only an explicit statement that the material is public domain or available under the GFDL makes material useable - and as far as I was concerned, this statement was not adequately provided in any of your contributions to Wikipedia. Perhaps you may feel it is a technicality, but it is something that is of extreme importance to the viability of Wikipedia - if you submit content, it must be compatible with the GFDL.
I also emphasize that 4 new articles you created are absolutely welcome and appropriate. Practically speaking, it will remain on Wikipedia in perpetuity. You will also notice that other contributors have already added various tags and cleanup alerts so that other users will come by and add more content. This is an indication that they are already welcome on Wikipedia, and that chances are other contributors over the next few months will improve on them. This is in stark contrast to your initial 4 article submissions, where they were immediately tagged as potential copyright violations. The community may not be correct all the time, but it is certainly robust at keeping "good" content, and removing "bad" content.
I hope this answers satifactorily the rationale behind my decisions - and if anything, humanizes whatever perception you may have of me. I am certainly and emphatically not here to censure content or to misuse my administrative powers. My purpose here is to serve the community, using whatever guidelines and policies that are available, and in combination with what are reasoned and measured judgement calls on my part. If you have any further questions, I would be more than happy to continue this conversation. But please if you respond, may I make a little request? I realize this conversation has been rather heated at times, and perhaps I have been a bit defensive. As a gesture of sincerity, I offer you our finest selection of wines and cheeses from Wikipedia. I hope this is an acceptable gesture of hospitality in France. Please enjoy, and feel free to invite your friends to read this discussion.
Yours in correspondance, --HC 18:30, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
 A glass of red wine |
 Vacherin du Haut-Doubs cheese |
[edit] Followup
Hi again,
I am beginning to feel that this could have been done much, much more quickly and with less hassle, had I not missed the one critical sentence in one of your responses: Second of all, of course we were willing to give our copyrighted texts to your foundation for free use and editing.
What a waste of time and energy this has been indeed. I'm sorry. Essentially, you wanted to add your material with the intention that it would be for "free use and editing", but it was not so clearly indicated until you posted here, after which point the pages were already deleted. Had you written that the articles were "for free use and editing" instead of "I owned the copyright" they most certainly would not have been deleted.
Anyway, with the assumption that I haven't sapped away your motivation and energy to add content to this project due to an exceptional and inexcusable amount of misunderstandings on my part, would you still be willing to add more content to Wikipedia then, and as I understand it, on behalf of the Estate of Germaine Tailleferre?
Please tell me how much material you wish to add, and in what format it will be in. Text, pictures, music media are all welcome, provided that they are licensed correctly and marked as such. If you have a lot of material to add in a short period of time, it may be more prudent for me to help you set up a "WikiProject" where you and your collaborators can coordinate your efforts on Wikipedia.
Admittingly, I feel a bit uneasy that you used the term "free use" above, as I cannot find a policy on Wikipedia that address this terminology to any extent. I am in the process of asking around whether there is something that will clarify this further on Wikipedia. There is "Fair use", but I suspect what you are saying is that it is something equivalent to the "GFDL".
Would it be possible for you to license the your material so that contains the phrase "public domain" or "GFDL"? You are of course not obligated to do this if you feel that what you have asserted here is sufficiently clear that it indeed is compatible with Wikipedia. In any case, I will not pursue this technicality any further with your future contributions, although I would prefer to see that you indeed state that your contributions are "public domain" or "GFDL" somewhere. Keep in mind that if you happen to add material that will look like a cut-and-paste of content from a website, this entire fiasco might happen again - I am quite keen on avoiding this. --HC 20:12, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Okay, this is now becoming a constructive process
Hello and thank you for taking the time to communicate with me.
This entire process was a misunderstanding due to the insistence on your use of your own "in-house" specialized terminology which, unfortunately, does not correspond to my terminology regarding copyright, "fair use", "free use" etc. This is only normal when one takes the time become part of a group effort, since knowing the jargon is an element of becoming part of a group.
The point of fact is that I really don't have the time to become as involved in this as you and others seem to be. I'm a musician, composer, publisher, record and concert producer, musicologist, conductor and any number of different things. I work very long hours and don't complain, because I love what I do. I don't have the time to relearn copyright law from the point of view of this website. And while the whole issue of the "deletion" process is fascinating to know, my objectives remain the simple documentation of this knowledge in the context of this encyclopedia. If I have to watch this in English, in French, in Italian, in Japanese etc etc everytime I contribute something, I'm not going to have much time for my other work. I'm sorry if that seems blunt, but it does express the reality of my life.
As an aside, to close the whole "commercialism" aspect of this matter, please be aware that anyone involved in the area of culture outside of mainstream media is almost certainly not doing what they do "for the money". We charge money because it costs money to do what we do (and we also have to eat, pay the rent and lots of other things...), but very few people who work in classical music publishing, classical concerts, classical recordings etc are making seven digit salaries--and those that are have already been entered into your database by their publicists or secretaries. Even famous people, like Maurice Ravel, Erik Satie and Germaine Tailleferre, lived very modestly, even sometimes dipping into the realm of poverty. Bringing money up at all in the context of these professions is not perhaps what we might call "in the best of taste"....and this will be my last word on that subject.
Getting back to the subject of these copyrighted texts, it seemed to me that by posting an article here that it implied that there was acceptance of the process of ANYBODY being able to edit the material. That was our objective from the beginning, since we don't pretend (even the composers themselves) to know everything about the careers of these people. By stating that I owned the copyright of these texts and was publishing them here for transformation through this process, it seemed to me to be quite clear that these were my intentions; If you needed me to say "This contribution is made according to the GFDL protocall" whatever it is that you call it, then why didn't someone say so? Both your colleague OwenX and you yourself simply assumed that I would instantly know what it was that you were talking about and even when it became obvious that I didn't, you're only now clearly explaining what it is that you needed me to say.
I am now therefore stating that all four texts which I have submitted and for which I hold the copyright were submitted in accordence with the "GFDL" standard and that they may be freely edited, distributed or otherwise modified as this community sees fit.
I could also have done this days ago, if someone had explained to me that was which you wanted. You could have avoided quite a lot of bad publicity and people raising their eyebrows about "censorship" and especially concerning the whole "notability" issue, which was not a good direction to take in working in the context of an encyclopedia. I do understand that this was not your intention, but you should perhaps reread some of these posts from the vantage point of someone who knows very little about your in-house process and consider how they might have appeared.
You should also be aware that quite a few people who are established academics, artists and other informed people but who are not familar with the way you naturally go about your work will have the same sort of reaction that I had. This might be something constructive to discuss amongst the administrators, since there might be ways of making this process work more smoothly simply by changing the way you use vocabulary and the way you approach people who are obviously new contributors.
In terms of working on a "wikiproject" or something like that, I'm not certain at all whether that would be useful or not because I do not understand what this means. Perhaps you might explain the process?
I have already begun modifying the article on Germaine Tailleferre according to my own current body of knowledge concerning her work--this was actually where I discovered this site in the first place. I have recently finished cataloging all known works for the Estate and have submitted this catalogue to Robert Orledge, who is one of the world's experts on French Music. When he has doublechecked my work, I will start adding this material. One thing that has stopped me is the whole issue of space. Would, for example, a listing of the 300 some works that Tailleferre wrote be appropriate in this context? How long should the biogrphical sketch be? At some point, too much information can be worse than not enough.
It is possible that we would be able eventually to upload some short soundclips (thirty seconds or so), other photos etc. Actually, we have much more material for which we control the rights from our other composers. It's not a all clear to me WHERE one does this and how these items are integrated in your pages.
In terms of the contributions themselves, I've asked several friends who are American University professors to read through your "style" pages to see if they might perhaps be able to understand exactly what you were getting at and the general reaction is that it is very difficult even for people who are writers to understand exactly what you're after. The term "vague" and "indefinite" came up repeatedly. It might be perhaps a good idea to rethink these pages in terms of clarity.
So, I will be adding things here as I see fit, with a focus on my own research and documenting the musical life of our Group of composers and associated artists. At times, certain materials will be copied directly from websites that I own. However, I will take care to include the phrase that you have suggested in the "talk" page and hopefully this should clear up any questions, barring any further zeal from those who wish to defend copyright holders from themselves. In any case, perhaps this has been a constructive process for you to follow as well as for me.Musikfabrik 13:57, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Hi again
Your comments well noted. Yes indeed, this was as much of a learning experience for me as it was for you. As policies on Wikipedia are developed organically within, it is only due to this sort of interaction that would help make the guidelines better. We don't often encounter editors like yourself. I will be updating some of our guidelines here on Wikipedia and incorporate some of the points you have raised, so if you plan to remain an active contributor here, I may need to ask you some additional questions so we can develop policies that better address the concerns of academics and the like who wish to contribute here with their own content. It is clear that there are inadequacies with the current protocols that are in place.
If you use text from your own websites for which you own the copyright, yes, please indicate on the talk page that you allow it to be used under the GFDL. If another administrator happens to delete the page, please let me know so I can swiftly undelete the content for you. I want to make sure you have an enjoyable editing experience here as it is certainly not the intention of Wikipedia to turn away editors.
I will come back in a little bit with more materials to help you on your quest. In particular, you may want to check out Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers, which provides some additional information on how biographical composers are being organized on Wikipedia. A WikiProject, is a project organized by a group of contributors with a common interest. As such, these people would be more familiar with your topic of interest, and would be more capable of helping you out - especially because you are contributing content related to music.
Also, you will want to insert the text {{stub}} at the bottom of your articles. This will send the article to our "stub sorting department" which will reclassify your music articles. This helps other contributors add content to your work.
Finally, for images, you can upload them by using the buttons on the side bar. An example of image insertion is below:
This text here: Image:WikiThanks.png gives this: 
I would not worry too much about the aesthetics. Initially concentrate on adding substance to the articles, as sooner or later other contributors will come by and help clean up the visual organization. (This is also another reason why you want to tag your articles as "stubs" - it attracts more attention to them).
Also, due to the significant amount of text on your talk page, you may consider archiving it soon so that it is not so long. You can do this by moving it to a subpage. You can do this by clicking on the "Move" button at the top, and tell Wikipedia to move it to User talk:Musikfabrik/Archive 1 for example (or whatever name you wish to use for your archives). --HC 02:30, 8 November 2005 (UTC)
