Re: Offer to upload a book, subject to conditions

Simetrical wrote:

>I know a professor of art history, Ph.D. from Columbia University and
>currently teaching at the City College of New York, who has written a
>book on how to write about art.  She isn't interested in making money
>off it, and would be interested in releasing it under a free license
>for Wikibooks to use.  However, she wants:
>
>1) That it come up on a Google search for her name, i.e., that there's
>some attribution on the pages themselves (not just in the history).
>
>2) That no one other than her change it (presumably other than
>wikilinking, breaking it into subpages, modifying navigational
>headers, that sort of thing).
>
>Now, obviously both points are largely against wiki principles, but my
>impression is that the basic goal of Wikibooks is to publish quality
>textbooks, and that wiki is just a means to an end here.  Would
>Wikibooks be willing to accept these terms?
>  
>
Has she considered Wikisource?  The goal of Wikisource is to preserve 
the content as is, with the only editing to improve minor spelling 
issues or to fix the content to a more historically accurate version. 
 "Donated" works are acceptable from what I understand as well.

The main thing that must be done is that it must be available for 
licensing under the GFDL, or something semi-compatable like the Creative 
Commons licensing (not CC-by-SA-NC though), or simply released into the 
public domain.  Apparently that isn't a problem.

In addition, I don't see a problem having her name clearly labeled as 
the author on the "title page", or even having subpages also listing her 
name as part of a navigation header or something like that.  This 
doesn't really go against Wiki principles at all.  Wikibooks themselves 
often have author pages where principle contributors try to stake out 
authorship claims for copyright purposes, with a list of authors 
sometimes on the "main page" of the Wikibook... or "people willing to 
help put this book together" like would also be found on Wikipedia on 
Wikiprojects.

Wikisource also has other navigation aids that might be useful, such as 
"author pages" and other things that might also fit in here.  She might 
even get a kick out of being lumped into the same page as other more 
classical authors like Samuel Clemmens and Frank Baum.

As far as being referenced on bookshelves on Wikibooks, I don't see harm 
in that either.  I've long been an advocate of integrating links between 
Wikisource and Wikibooks where appropriate, but trying to find 
volunteers who would be willing to catalog the content of both projects 
has been very hard to come by.  This certainly can be referenced by 
Wikibooks projects, as well as be used on Wikiversity, and in fact is 
encouraged.

Getting high rankings on the Google search would not be a problem at 
all.  Considering the high number of links going to and coming from 
various websites, the categories such a book would be in on Wikisource, 
and the activity on the various Wikimedia projects, I would have a hard 
time seeing that this wouldn't appear as one of the top 20 websites with 
her name if it were put on there.  I'm not speaking for Google here or 
promising anything in particular, but historically Wikimedia projects 
generally appear quite high in google rankings for many reasons.

The other issue that I would imagine would be to have resolved would be 
to have all of the images properly sourced and to make sure that they 
can be available to a GFDL'd project.  If there are some fair-use images 
being used, you might want to take this issue up with the Scriptorium on 
Wikisource for some further guidance.

This is a good idea, and I think that some accomodations can be made. 
 Try to follow up on this and see if there is some way we can get the 
content onto some sort of Wikimedia server, although I would recommend 
Wikisource as the ultimate site, considering what she is aiming for here.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning