Help:Ownership of articles

Subversive Technologies & Countermeasures

[edit] Control of WikiSTC articles

First, there's control of the article. Some contributors feel very possessive about articles they have donated to this project. Some go so far as to defend them against all intruders.

Well, it's one thing to take an interest in an article that you maintain on your watchlist. Maybe you really are an expert or you just care about the topic a lot. But when this watchfulness crosses a certain line, then you're overdoing it.

You can't stop everyone in the world from editing "your" prose, once you've posted it to WikiSTC. As each edit page clearly states:

If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly or redistributed by others, do not submit it. [emphasis added]

If you find yourself warring with other contributors over deletions, reversions and so on, why not take some time off from the editing process? Taking yourself out of the equation can cool things off considerably. Take a fresh look a week or two later.

Or if someone else is claiming "ownership" of a page, you can bring it up on the associated talk page. Appeal to other contributors, or consider the dispute resolution process.

Although working on an article does not entitle one to "own" the article, it is still important to respect the work of your fellow contributors. When making large scale removals of content, particularly content contributed by one editor, it is important to consider whether a desirable result could be obtained by working with the editor, instead of against him or her - regardless of whether he or she "owns" the article or not.

[edit] Legal ownership of text

Second, there's the question of legal ownership, which is where copyright law applies.

Contrary to popular belief, WikiSTC articles are copyrighted. However, this does not imply that they are illegal to copy. The author – legally called the "copyright holder" – of a text (or any other creative work) can grant rights over the text to other people. These rights are codified in a licence. By submitting an article (or indeed a self-made photograph, drawing, diagram or other image) to WikiSTC, a contributor agrees to licensing their work under the GNU Free Documentation License or GNU General Public License, which grants everyone else on the planet the right to copy and modify the text or source code provided they fulfill certain requirements (such as author attribution). Submitting an article or source code does not surrender the author's copyright, but at the same time, the author cannot prohibit modifications to it because the author has granted the rights codified in the GFDL or GPL.

When someone makes an edit to an article, that someone has created what is called a "derivative work". He or she is the copyright holder of the new version, but since the new version is based on the old version, which was licensed to them under the GFDL or GPL, he or she is bound to the requirements of the GFDL or GPL, and thus they cannot act as if he or she were the sole author of the new version. This carries on indefinitely: no matter how many edits are made to an article, even the hundredth revision is still subject to the requirements determined by the licence of the first revision.

In summary, the author(s) of an article are legally the "copyright holders" and could thus be regarded as the "owners", but since they cannot prohibit modifications, it could also be said that everyone "owns" every article in the sense that everyone has the right to copy or improve them.

It should be mentioned at this point that the copyright holder of a creative work retains full rights to it and is not subject to any requirements even if he or she licenses their work under the GFDL or GPL(for example, the author does not need to attribute themselves as the author if he or she is the only one). The author can license the same work again under any other licence – and indeed many Wikipedians agree to licensing their work under one or more further licences in addition to the GFDL or GPL– or he or she can even surrender their copyright (immediately or later), thereby suddenly removing the GFDL or GPL's requirements and allowing things that were previously forbidden (such as copying the text without author attribution). When a text has no copyright attached to it (because the author surrendered it or it expired), the text becomes "public domain", which means that anyone can do with it whatever he or she likes.

This original text taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles.