vorticity Wrote:We're probably going to have a couple of phone numbers that people can call if they have concerns. It doesn't mean we'll always agree with them, but having a real conversation with another human voice always calms issues on wikis in my experience.
Another policy that will change: Explicitly listing copyrights, and asking editors to submit under our particular license. Seriously, they don't have you agree to any statement, terms of service, or anything. The grant of copyright is only implicit in the fact that you edited the site. A mature website should never have these kind of huge legal holes.
Okay, a quick and unofficial summary of Creative Commons Licenses:- CC0 (Zero): Essentially create a public domain resource, even in countries that don't have public domain.
- CC-By: Attribution only. You can add any license on top of this, so long as the attribution condition remains.
- CC-By-NC: Attribution/Non-Commercial: You can relicense the content, but you cannot use the content or its derivatives for private inurement.
- CC-By-SA: Attrib./Share Alike. You can only relicense the content under a similar or more restrictive license. You can make money off the content, so long as you also make it available under the CC-By-SA license.
- GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL): Roughly the same terms as CC-By-SA.
- CC-By-NC-SA: The most restrictive license, content can only be relicensed under the same. All derivative works must be noncommercial and must be made available under the same license.
You can always increase the restriction level of CC license on derivative works, but not the other way around until the copyright term expires, unless the content's creator otherwise grants a new permission on the content.
On an unrelated note, I found an old archive of Troper Tales in a usable format. Should those be added back into the mix? I don't really want to bring up old debates, but apparently I'm doing it anyway. Does anyone have a strong opinion on Troper Tales? Because I sure don't have much of an opinion. So I don't see that we have a choice - if TVTropes is operating as CC-By-NC-SA, that's what we have to use if we want to use any of their content, correct? Or was their change recent enough that we can be sure the archive copy we have was all done under CC-By-SA?
I kinda like Troper Tales, and it's the one thing on TVTropes I actually have contributed to, but I'm with the others - it can wait.
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The change to a noncommercial license happened a couple of weeks after I ripped the site, so it doesn't affect our starting content.
Also, I realize that I forgot to mention the No-Derivatives variants of the CC licenses, but those are not suitable for wikis for obvious reasons.
-- ∇×V
vorticity Wrote:The change to a noncommercial license happened a couple of weeks after I ripped the site, so it doesn't affect our starting content.
Also, I realize that I forgot to mention the No-Derivatives variants of the CC licenses, but those are not suitable for wikis for obvious reasons. Ah. So it looks like our choices are to A.) restrict how people can use the content (i.e. : Non Commercial Only) or B.) restrict how people contribute to the site, as we will have to make explicit the fact that : "You cannot bring any new content over from TVTropes to this site, unless you are the original contributor of that content on TV Tropes."
B.) kind of sounds like an administrative nightmare waiting to happen. Even if the rule was simply "No new content from TVTropes at all" we couldn't police that automatically.
Am I wrong?
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You're wrong on a couple of details, Nylor. First of all, we're going to have to restrict what content is on the site anyway, because of the rampant phenomenon of crtl+c/ctrl+v. That's going to be inherent to the site no matter what copyright we choose, although its certainly more tempting to import things from TVT directly than any other site. Secondly, you can bring things over from TVT if you get the page's creators to grant a CC-BY-SA or more permissive license. Tertiarywise, I'm not 100% sure that something like a bare list of tropes is creative enough to even be copyrightable -- and if it is, we might have a educational fair use reason for using it anyway.
The big thing here is that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), we would qualify for DMCA Safe Harbor on user-submitted content. So until someone sends us a letter telling us to take down specific pages -- and we choose not to take them down -- we aren't really opening ourselves to liability. It isn't our job as administrators to ensure that our content is all legal when it's posted, but it is our job to ensure that any infringing content is removed when we're informed about it through appropriate legal channels. (However, I'm not even sure that TV Tropes would have legal standing to even send a takedown request, given that it's not the copyright owner, and they make no attempt to request ownership (or even a license, explicitly). But that's a question for a real lawyer, since it's a bit out of my league.)
-- ∇×V
Fair enough. That's a good point that TVT may not have grounds to make a complaint - I'm just sort of expecting the worst from FastEddie, I suppose.
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Oh, I'm not expecting the worst from Fast Eddie. Things seem to be a little too haphazard from him. Decisions come from nowhere, without informing the community or seeking their consent beforehand. They play loosey-goosey with copyright laws -- there's no way all of those images are Creative Commons content, though the entire wiki has a blanket license. The "We don't want a page on" Lolita thing was laughably bad, almost as if it designed to enrage a segment of the community.
No, if Fast Eddie and Co. had any idea what they were doing, we wouldn't be in this situation at all. So I have no expectations of sudden competence coming from TV Tropes. He did make a pretty nice community over at TVT, but I'm starting to wonder how much of that was inherited from work that Gus did.
-- ∇×V
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Nice to hear there's some progress being made. I think some people are starting to realize that they are engaged in vigorously throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but that doesn't mean that it's going to actually *stop*.
-Morgan.
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Nothing really new to report, but I thought that I'd share this:
TVT Forum: Don't ask questions about the copyright in public (thread locked)
Well, I guess I should say that we are working on the wiki policy pages. Send me an email or forum PM if you're interested in working on those, but be warned that it's currently a bunch of boring legalese.
-- ∇×V
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That, sadly, seems very typical for the TVTropes of recent years -- right down to the message censored by the mods because it apparently said or asked something they didn't want to hear. A genuine open community doesn't fear or suppress dissent .
And banning discussion of copyright? Someone's got something to hide, I think.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:That, sadly, seems very typical for the TVTropes of recent years -- right down to the message censored by the mods because it apparently said or asked something they didn't want to hear. A genuine open community doesn't fear or suppress dissent .
And banning discussion of copyright? Someone's got something to hide, I think. At the very least, it's concerning that they don't want to answer the question in the public eye, even if it is simply that "we thought it would work better in terms of us not getting zinged regarding having advertising," or "we want to publish a book of this later". Yes, the latter might make people not want to contribute anymore, but so will publishing a book without telling the community it's happening first.
The "we don't want armchair lawyers making false claims" doesn't hold a lot of water when you can just answer the question in public, and THEN lock the thread out.
Ironically, lack of transparency during their recent site upgrade was why I decided DAZ3D was no longer earning money from me. Sometimes, it doesn't take much to earn my trust, but it takes even less to utterly destroy the bowl I keep the particular allocation in.
--
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
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Quote:At the very least, it's concerning that they don't want to answer the question in the public eye, even if it is simply that "we thought it would work better in terms of us not getting zinged regarding having advertising," or "we want to publish a book of this later". Yes, the latter might make people not want to contribute anymore, but so will publishing a book without telling the community it's happening first.
Not necessarily. The Hacker's Jargon File was published as a book something like 20 years ago, but the online version is still around, and even if it's now a bit moribund still was updated rather extensively after the book came out.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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vorticity Wrote:Well, I guess I should say that we are working on the wiki policy pages. Send me an email or forum PM if you're interested in working on those, but be warned that it's currently a bunch of boring legalese. Yes, please do. I penned the first iteration of some of those pages and Vorticity's made changes of his own, but one goal here is consensus from the initial wiki population about those policies. They're not going to be imposed from above, but shaped and approved by the membership.
Oh, and not all of it is boring. I tried to write some stuff there in the spirit of Borland's old "plain English" license language.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Should have time to take a look at those today..
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I suppose it isn't all boring, but it was most important to get the copyright bits right first. If they're so afraid of questions on TVT, obviously something is up, which makes it critical that we get it right from the beginning. Since the community consensus was more or less "avoid the NC license unless you think the legal issues will get too thorny", and they won't due to DMCA protections, our license has been fixed as CC-BY-SA. We don't have a lot of legal wiggle room, so there's not much to debate here.
As for everything else, it's pretty much all up for debate. Let me know if you want to get involved. Nothing's going to be fixed until late in the beta, so there will still be time to contribute later. But the earlier, the better -- think of it as needing more prereaders for our policies.
I updated the first post to reflect the current status (sadly little has changed), as well as listing a new email for me, brent@allthetropes.org.
One thing that came up in our discussion, that I thought I'd bring back here, is the namespace Series/, which includes all of the Live Action TV on TVT. It's really ambiguous, so I was wondering if people could come up with a better suggestion. Choices I've seen so far are "Series", "TV", "Live Action", "Live Action TV", "LATV", "TV Series", "Live-Action" (with the hyphens). Anyone have an idea of what to do with that? I'll be rewriting all of the links anyway, so import is the time to change stuff like this.
-- ∇×V
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"Series" is a bad name on its own - there are book series (e.g. the Harry Potter novels), film series (e.g. the James Bond movies), even opera series (e.g the Ring cycle). It made sense to use the term back when TVTropes was all about TV, but it doesn't make sense to use it on its own in AllTheTropes.
Acronyms are bad unless they're blatantly obvious, which "LATV" isn't. (That could be taken as "Los Angeles TV", as distinct from "BritishTV" or "TokyoTV"... especially since Hollywood is in LA.)
Can you nest namespaces, creating a hierarchy? If you can, then you could have Series/TV/, Series/Novel/, Series/Movie/, and so on. Of course, then you'd have to worry about duplication when people use different hierarchy schemes (e.g. Series/Novel/HarryPotter, Novel/Series/HarryPotter, and Series/HarryPotter/Novel)...
--
Rob Kelk
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them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
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Also there's a possible nomenclature confusion, too. Don't the British and the Japanese refer to what Americans call "seasons" as "series"? As in "The first series of Monty Python was broadcast from xxxx to xxxx"? We need something distinct from both to avoid confusion. "TVShow"?
-- Bob
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Why not just use "Franchise" in lieu of anything like "Series" as we Americans understand it? That should solve a lot of the namespace problems.
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In Britain Franchise means the whole lot. If someone mentioned the Star Wars franchise, it'd means the films and the books and the comics and the clone wars animated and the role playing games and the computer games . . . .
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Likewise in Canada...
--
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them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
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And coming from California, I think that "Franchise" would manage to be less precise and even more ambiguous. I hadn't thought about the use of "series" in other countries. But any serial work, be it a set of novels or baseball game finals, can be a series. So I guess the original name is out.
robkelk Wrote:Can you nest namespaces, creating a hierarchy? If you can, then you
could have Series/TV/, Series/Novel/, Series/Movie/, and so on. Of
course, then you'd have to worry about duplication when people use
different hierarchy schemes (e.g. Series/Novel/HarryPotter,
Novel/Series/HarryPotter, and Series/HarryPotter/Novel)... I think you just came up with the major argument against your own idea. I don't think that noting something is in a series of novels makes much sense in a page link... though maybe people could link to "Literature/Harry Potter/And the Order of the Phoenix" if they want to be cute.
Series is currently representing: "a serial, live-action work made for the television box". I feel like "Live-Action Television" would be most correct and precise (though it would include made-for-TV movies, oh well). But people would definitely screw up the hyphen. It's 22 characters, and probably the most common namespace out there. Things that are common should be short. I guess what I'm really asking is: Is something like "TV" or "TV Show" going to cause people to complain? Or is there some awesome, short descriptor I haven't thought of yet?
"Western Animation" is also long at 18 characters, while it's not nearly as common. I'm not sure why we shouldn't just use "Animation" there -- the current "Animation" namespace seems to be a mix of Russian, South Asian, and African animated works -- with only 68 entries that could simply be folded in.
-- ∇×V
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Jinx999 Wrote:In Britain Franchise means the whole lot. If someone mentioned the Star Wars franchise, it'd means the films and the books and the comics and the clone wars animated and the role playing games and the computer games . . . .
That's pretty much what "Franchise" is already *used* for on TVT. Take, for instance, Franchise/DotHack, which links together novels, games, anime, and manga. So even if it wasn't commonly thought to mean something else, the namespace is already occupied.
One point in favor of "LiveActionTelevision" (or with the hyphen, but I think hyphens in namespace names are best avoided) is that it's already commonly used when sorting out trope listings. (Not that practice in that area is entirely consistent, but still.) "LiveActionTV" might be tolerable - reasonably clear, not likely to be confounded with another medium, but a bit shorter. "TV" or "TV Show" would partially confound with the animation categories for animated TV series.
The made-for-tv movies is kind of an interesting thing. All the ones I can think of to look up are associated with TV series and just got the mentions stuck on those pages. (Except for Jesse Stone. It's stuck on the page for the novels, except that page is actually just sitting in main it looks like...)
On "Western Animation": I suspect that name was chosen to differentiate it from anime - ie, eastern animation. I didn't even know there *was* a plain "Animation" namespace.
Nesting namespaces more than we're already looking at strikes me as a bad idea.
-Morgan.
Hello,
I have entered in the forum specifically to give you my opinion on
this issue.
So far, I've been
a big fan of TVTropes and I considered it one of the best and most
useful websites of the net, but in the end I have ended deeply
disappointed with the successive changes it has undergone. It's no
longer the open and fun page it used to be. So I wish you luck
in your project. I think it's necessary an alternative to recover the
original spirit of TVTropes.
I would like to give a
suggestion. Referring to Tropes Tales, I think it's a function that
must be resurrected if you want to succeed with your project. Tropes
Tales used to be my favorite section of TVTropes and its disposal
was my first big disappointment with that site.
But mostly, I
guess you do not want “The New TVTropes” to be simply a museum or
only a copy of the "Authentic Tvtropes” that only visit a few
people and almost no one knows.
To succeed,
wikitropes needs to offer something that does not offer its
competitor, tvtropes (law of the market). TVTropes has a huge
advantage over your project - its well established, has many regular
visitors and has built a name over the years, while you are newly
arrived and unknown. Being simply
"tvtropes uncensored" is not enough. It can even lead to
some bad name, if that is the only differentiating factor with
tvtropes.
That's
why Tropes Tales must be re-established as quickly as possible with
the contents that still remain in the storage
([url= http://tropertales.wikkii.com),] http://tropertales.wikkii.com),[/url] and allow new contributions as a way
to gain notoriety and compete with tvtropes.
Well, that's all for now.
Good
luck, everyone!
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I sort of agree with the general "market share" principle, although I'm not sure that Troper Tales would be a major factor for a lot of people in that. On the other hand, it probably wouldn't hurt.
Taking content directly from the wikkii site, however, might be a bad idea. The licensing looks kind of funky, with the site purportedly under GFDL 1.2, but having been seeded with CC licensed content. But there's a zip file containing original source from TVT that should be safe to use. (And it shouldn't be too difficult to feed into the importer either, always a plus.)
-Morgan.
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GFDL wikis can be relicensed as CC-BY-SA, but not the other way around. Still, because of the random threats of legal action from TV Tropes I heard about, we're going to do this by the book. So we'll work from the archive, when it was split off, which is already in the right format.
Now, adding the Troper Tales back in the mix is something I can do. And since I'm still waiting on wiki software, and I think I've got all of the bugs worked out of the wikicode translator , I'll probably work on it tomorrow. Troper Tales probably would be good for the wiki, now that I think about it, in moving the community back in to the wikispace. Since we won't be having an integrated forum, the whole community will be in the wiki, which I hope will decrease fragmentation.
As for the Fetish Fuel namespace -- well, someone would have to give me a damn good argument that it's a good idea to bring that mass of crazy to a new site.
The general idea is to bring a lot more to TV Tropes on the technical side, like a GUI editor, multiple level namespaces ("Anime/Neon Genesis Evangelion/Characters"), full Unicode support, and better page histories (off the top of my head). On the community side, we obviously can't promise as many people will edit. But we will promise to actually inform people as to what's going on, and let people have a say in decisions that affect large amounts of the wiki's contents. And to be non-commercial and advertising free. So the idea is to try to be more than TV Tropes on as many levels as possible -- more features, more content, more inclusive.
Thanks for posting, Ferfer.
-- ∇×V
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We'd have to police Troper Tales a bit closely -- there were places where it was its own mass of crazy approaching Fetish Fuel -- but I definitely missed it when it got yanked. (I intuited that its removal was somehow critical, but didn't realize just what it had heralded for quite a while.) I think that Ferfer's got the right idea, as long as people don't get too extreme there.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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