Re: FW: Wikibooks Usage Permission

Guillaume Paumier wrote:
> On 5/18/07, Andrew Whitworth <[email protected]> wrote:
>   
>> I got this email today, don't know if it's legitimate or what. I also dont
>> know why they singled out me, or thanked me for Wikibooks. Anyway, what do
>> people make of this?
>>     
>
>
> Proposals of collaboration or usage of Wikimedia brands / logos must be
> addressed to the office. Also, please don't publish private emails
> containing names, addresses, phone numbers etc. on publicly archived mailing
> lists :)
>
>   
I'm not entirely sure what exactly this means.  Why is it not possible 
to request a collaboration with the community that is producing the 
content rather than having to use individuals who may not even be 
familiar with the project that collaboration is sought with?

In this case they are only asking to make a deep link within a Wikimedia 
project.  I was not aware that this was a controversial issue with the 
WMF, or that there was any legal basis or even desire to prohibit 
individuals or organizations from linking to specific pages within a 
project like Wikibooks.  That is all that is being requested here, 
although it is nice to know that they are trying to catalog some of our 
content.

I would try to encourage them to look at some of the featured books that 
can be found here:  http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Featured_books

It is unlikely that these books are going to be deleted (there have been 
some notable exceptions!) but I would have strong reason to believe that 
the links to these Wikibooks would be quite stable, and these are books 
that of sufficient quality that it would be worth trying to integrate 
them into a general catalog of e-books.  If anything, this is something 
we have been spending a little bit of time talking about on the Staff 
Lounge from time to time, and I've hoped that we could encourage 
external groups that would want to use these books in exactly this sort 
of fashion.

It may be useful to have some individual Wikibooks users to help with 
this cataloging effort, as this is usually done on a voluntary basis as 
well.  The authors themselves, or perhaps individuals who have been 
working with proofreading or cataloging these books on Wikibooks 
bookshelves would obviously be familiar with the content.  This is what 
I mean be a join collaborative effort between two on-line communities.  
Andrew is certainly what I would consider to be a legitimate contact 
point for a request like this.