User talk:JediRogue/Ethics

It is an interesting proposal. I would be interested to read your final draft. One comment I have is that the legal aspect of this matter is almost, if not more, interesting than the political aspect. I would suggest not focusing too much on pillorying Gravewit (even though I have no love for the man) and instead try to examine objectively whether there was any real wrong here. If you have been avoiding the licensing issues, this would be the perfect chance for you to learn a lot while writing the paper, assuming it interests you. Best of luck. 193.52.24.125 14:59, 25 September 2007 (CDT)
 * Thanks for your input. I plan to look at this both legally and ethically because it is an ethics class and it does have to be a 8 page paper and a presentation so i think I can do both. By the way, you've made a lot of edits, you should consider being a registered user. (if you're not one in hiding.)&mdash; ♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 16:40, 25 September 2007 (CDT)

"The ad revenue for the site is only allowed insofar as it goes toward paying hosting costs. All other monies are profit and disallowed by the licensing of the wiki."
This was almost never an issue people focused on while Gravewit was running GuildWiki. A few members of the community did challenge Gravewit when he switched from Donations to Ads, but it's more about believing donations ought to be refunded if ads is a self-sufficient form of financing. No one ever bothered to ensure/ask/challenge Gravewit to not make any profit from hosting GuildWiki, to the best of my recollection. It only became an issue the community paid attention to when "oh no, a commercial company is going to take over!" -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 21:13, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree that this was not really a big issue that most were concerned with but I felt that it is part of the larger issue of profiting from our contributions. The fact that this whole thing is kind of shady also speaks about Gravewit's tendencies and nature.&mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥  22:40, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not saying this isn't important, I was trying to point out the community had a double-standard, adn that double-standard might be worth highlighting. -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png]]) 01:21, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Except for Karlos. [[Image:Entropy Sig.jpg]] (T/C) 15:43, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

can we make minor edits on this?
I want to can a case of "Users" to "Some users", and fix a "he" to "the". -User:PanSola (talk to the ) 21:21, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I've already handed it in (10 minutes ago lol). You can make minor changes to grammar for readability I suppose. I mainly posted it to sum up the whole thing and to share it. &mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 22:37, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Win
Almost makes me want to take Ethics classes. I could write stuff about GuildWiki, and get school credit! Wohoo!...anyway, I think this is a nice job. It is a good way of taking something positive out of a decidedly unfortunate quagmire. It also helps to sum up the situation for newer users who can't be bothered (understandably so) to read through the hundreds of other source posts at the Wikia discussion article and talk. (T/C) 15:43, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

What I know today
Then, you wrote There is a feeling that it is in fact the content which is being sold. When I first read it, I agreed. Today, I would adjust it: it was in fact the traffic whihc was being sold. Typically, the domain owner is credited with building a site that attracts traffic; he is typically the one that profits from the traffic by running ads etc. By buying the domain, Wikia directly profits from the traffic being directed at it; they invest in wikis so they can farm traffic.

The problem is that this economic model is somewhat appropriate for sites that have been created by the owner or its staff, even though its readers advertising the site by word-of-mouth often had a significant part in building this traffic. If you consider typical Web 2.0 pages whose content often has been created by people who don't stand to profit from the traffic, it feels unfair to let the person who happens to have set up the server be the one to profit from the traffic that the content created.

This is a situation that the "noncommercial" clause in the CC BY-NC-SA clause was meant to prohibit: nobody was to make a profit off the content. The content generates traffic, the traffic increases the value of the domain, and the server host profits from the value of the domain when he sells it. Is that even legal? Is it ethical?

It turns out in hindsight that a wiki community should be set up differently to prevent this. It should be a non-profit association that owns its name as a trademark (GuildWiki could probably claim it is just that and claim its name as trademark right now), which gives it control over the associated domain name. It needs to act as a publisher.

Wikia is operating its "noncommercial" wikis on the same legal loophole, by profiting not from the content directly, but rather from the traffic that hosting it generates. It would be interesting to examine whether our current copyright license actually supports this model or not.

--◄mendel► 08:21, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

import
I imported your latest revision of User:JediRogue/Ethics to http://www.guildwiki.org/User:JediRogue/Ethics and left a comment on the talkpage there. --◄mendel► 08:24, 9 December 2010 (UTC)