A good moment to remember this. *Permit mirror sites.*
When information is available on the web only at one site, its availability is vulnerable. A local problem—a computer crash, an earthquake or flood, a budget cut, a change in policy of the school administration—could cut off access for everyone forever. To guard against loss of the encyclopedia's material, we should make sure that every piece of the encyclopedia is available from many sites on the Internet, and that new copies can be put up if some disappear. There is no need to set up an organization or a bureaucracy to do this, because Internet users like to set up “mirror sites” which hold duplicate copies of interesting web pages. What we must do in advance is ensure that this is legally permitted. Therefore, each encyclopedia article and each course should explicitly grant irrevocable permission for anyone to make verbatim copies available on mirror sites. This permission should be one of the basic stated principles of the free encyclopedia. Some day there may be systematic efforts to ensure that each article and course is replicated in many copies—perhaps at least once on each of the six inhabited continents. This would be a natural extension of the mission of archiving that libraries undertake today. But it would be premature to make formal plans for this now. It is sufficient for now to resolve to make sure people have permission to do this mirroring when they get around to it. —Richard M. Stallman <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_M._Stallman>, The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource<http://www.gnu.org/encyclopedia/free-encyclopedia.html> 2011/10/5 Jay Walsh <jwa...@wikimedia.org> > Hi folks - apologies for starting a new thread on this topic... > > We've just posted a short blog post on the topic of the unfolding issues > around Italian Wikipedia > > > http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/10/04/regarding-recent-events-on-italian-wikipedia/ > > We've had a few calls to WMF - not many, and we've responded with the basic > messages in this post. > > Thanks, > jay > > -- > Jay Walsh > Head of Communications > WikimediaFoundation.org > blog.wikimedia.org > +1 (415) 839 6885 x 6609, @jansonw > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
