User talk:Odie5533

Welcome to PathfinderWiki! We hope you will contribute as much as you are able and that you find the community welcoming and helpful. If you have any questions, please read our help pages, visit the forums, or contact an administrator. Again, welcome and have fun! — FoiledAgain (talk) 11:06, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

We'll, it seems you beat me to it, Odie5533! Welcome to the dark side! --Brandingopportunity (talk) 20:26, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Moved Conversation from Pathfinder.wikia.com

This conversation began on our old site: "I still want to make some more edits on this wiki, particularly to the CSS of the main page to make it flow better. Since many of the admins seem to be editing the new wiki, I was wondering if I could receive admin on this Wiki to try to make it a good archive of information. Please let me know if this would be possible. Thanks." AND "I would still like to make some changes to this wiki. Have you considered my request for admin? Alfred is actually the only bureaucrat on here, so he would need to be the one to make me admin. Is he still around?" -- Odie5533

Hello again Odie. I moved our conversation over here, since very few regular editors of this wiki still frequent our old site. Alfred does not participate actively on this site (or the wikia site), so the chances of getting you admin status there is pretty slim. Although I am only speaking for myself and not the other admins of this wiki, we would really love to have you over here, as Wikia has not exactly treated us well and is unhelpful when told that they are using Paizo IP without the proper permission. --Brandingopportunity (talk) 18:48, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Alfred is the only bureaucrat on the Wikia because, when Aeakett and I attempted to remove content from the wiki that violated Paizo's Community Use Policy, all our edits were reverted and we were stripped of administrator rights. While you're free to do what you want with the Wikia site, we continue our efforts to get content removed from the site via DMCA takedown notices (most of which Wikia has ignored). I'd hate to see the efforts of someone who wanted to make a better resource for Pathfinder players go to waste because they were editing the wiki that wasn't respecting Paizo's IP. — Yoda8myhead (talk) 19:09, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

Has Wikia not treated you well other than regarding the content copyright issue? Only the copyright owner Paizo can send DMCA takedown notices; has Paizo sent such notices to Wikia? And if so, has Paizo received no response at all? I am reluctant to contribute here since this wiki does not use a free license like the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license that Wikia uses. --Odie5533 (talk) 10:10, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

As Wikia staff talk about the take-down notice that Vic sent them on Mark's talk page on the wikia version, we can definitively say that they did receive the notice from paizo. The other issues I can remember are that:

1) we do not have the ability to append the CC to the community use policy, this really only becomes an issue when you consider number 3, but also means that most of those pages do not actually legally fall under the CC license

2)We as a project could not control what was CC and what wasn't. The CC was put on every page automatically, so the 4% or less of the project that legally fit under CC, could not be marked as such without the oter 96% also marked that way.

3)The CC allows things that the community license specifically calls out as violations. This includes having third parties come, bundle a bunch of pages, and then sell them on amazon (yes this did happen to the wikia wiki, luckily the cease and desist the paizo must have sent that publishing company must have worked, as those are no longer available). It also allows sites to use the terms/creatures/names/ect in non-Community Use Policy pages freely, which is a copywrite/IP violation.

Those were the issues I remember off the top of my head. -- Cpt kirstov (talk) 01:03, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

As a Paizo employee, I can assure you that steps were taken to get the Wikia content removed. I am not a member of Paizo's tech team, however, so beyond the fact that at least one notice was sent, I can't speak much to it. As for this wiki not using a free license, we've had some discussion on how to attribute such to templates, code, and other non-Paizo IP or non-OGL content but have yet to do so. We need to figure out a way to do so without also appending additional licenses to the wiki's content which is covered by the CUP.

The legal/rights issues with Wikia didn't come up until a year or two after we forked, which we did because we didn't like not having control of our own site, its general appearance, and its functions. Wikia implemented a new site-wide skin that we were uninterested in, added a bunch of crap like chats and blogs and such that we felt cluttered things up. They were generally uncooperative in helping us make the wiki what we wanted it to be, and all the ads, cross-wikia promotions, and other superfluous content was enough that we decided to move here. As we were a relatively small community at the time, the result was that there has been almost literally no one editing that site for years. We can't keep you from working on the wikia, but I'd rather see another editor (who seems to have a bit of experience and insight into running a wiki) here on this site. If we need to figure out a way to get a free license added to some of the content on the site, I can talk with some folks here at the office and see what we'd need to do to make that work.

In short, you seem like you'd be a great addition to the team. I hope you contribute here, but if you want to work on the wikia instead, I can try to get ahold of Alfred to get you admin privileges over there. Or I can add them myself here, if you decide to stick around and help improve things here (perhaps starting with suggestions on how to integrate a free license into the project that would satisfy you and perhaps other editors to join). — Yoda8myhead (talk) 01:28, 7 May 2014 (UTC)

Thank you both for the detailed replies. I left a reply to the copyright issue on the Wikia here. See this page on the Commons for more details on the legal aspects. When writing about copyrighted works, there are two copyrights involved: (1) that of the wiki contributor whose words are copyright to himself and (2) the rights belonging to the author of the copyrighted work (in this case Paizo). Here Paizo has chosen to license portions of their works under the CUP. Additionally, Wikia contributors agree to license their work under the CC-BY-SA. I do not see anything in the CUP that disallows releasing derivative works under the CC-BY-SA, except that it must be clear that there are (as there often are) multiple copyrights involved. Even if Paizo did not offer the CUP, it's still be fine to discuss their work as long as the discussion constitutes fair use. I believe this is how Wikia considers much of their content to be licensed: purely under fair use, regardless of the CUP or any CUP-like licenses.

Those reusing content either from here or from Wikia must ensure that their reuse is either fair use, covered by the CC-BY-SA, or covered by the CUP. You could add a notice to Wikia telling users that for them to reuse content they must ensure they do it legally, respecting the copyrights of the contributors as well as Paizo.

The content on this Wiki is not all covered by the CUP—only the rights held by Paizo which are used here are covered by the CUP. The other half of the copyright on this wiki belongs to the contributors and is licensed under this simple statement: "All original contributions to PathfinderWiki are the property of their creators. By posting to PathfinderWiki, the creator agrees to have the content hosted here and to allow other contributors to expand, edit, or otherwise modify it." (from PathfinderWiki:Copyrights). Rather than using that statement as a license for contributions, you could use the CC-BY-SA license like Wikia does. --Odie5533 (talk) 13:23, 7 May 2014 (UTC)