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One thing that commercial encyclopedias like Encarta can have that Wikipedia can’t is non-free content. Say you can buy the rights for 1000s of images from some
by hk__2 7y ago
One thing that commercial encyclopedias like Encarta can have that Wikipedia can’t is non-free content. Say you can buy the rights for 1000s of images from some source; you can use them in your private encyclopedia, but Wikipedia’s medias must be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons and for this must be under a CC-like license or in the public domain.
- kragen 7y agoThis is indeed an enormous problem, and a very significant reason we need to shorten copyright terms. When copyright terms were retroactively lengthened here in Argentina, we had to delete huge swaths of historical footage and photography from Wikipedia. Into the memory hole! Wikimedia Commons is more relaxed about licensing than Wikipedia is for text — because most of the images on Wikipedia and allied projects are not and cannot be created specifically for Wikipedia, we have to tolerate a wider spread of licensing terms. However, the images do need to be licensed for use on Wikipedia, which is already a pretty permissive license. See my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741101 for more social context.