Textual Ownership

What I really wanted to talk about concerning Andrea Abernethy Lunsford's “Feminism, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Textual Ownership” was Wikipedia. I spent my free time this summer editing Wikipedia. Obviously I no longer have such time, so that’s firmly in the past. Of course, the word “editor” sounds authoritative to some people, but Wikipedia is, after all, “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”

My contributions to Wikipedia put me in a position to actually think about copyright, fair use, and ownership of my words and ideas.

On Wikipedia, by editing, you license your contributions to be used in any way that falls under the GNU Free Documentation License. Whoever uses the content is required to give credit to the contributors, but the contributors don’t have a say in how the content is used, except that it has to stay under the same license.

I like this arrangement. The information is free, but attributed.

I contributed substantially to the article on Christina Hoff Sommers and was involved in working out some issues regarding certain classifications of her stance. We worked out a way to express the fact that CHS is not usually considered a mainstream feminist, but reappropriates the term for herself.

Then I visited the German Wikipedia. Quotations that I had supplied and sentences I had constructed had been carried over and translated. That’s great, that’s what Wikipedia is about, sharing information. But the person who did this gave no attribution to those of us who had worked on it at the English Wikipedia. Conventionally, this is covered by a simple edit summary that says information is being merged from another article, so a person can go back and look at the attribution page for the other article. But no such edit summary was given. As such, it appeared as if this person had written the paragraphs without help.

That’s what I care about. I want information to be free. I want fair use to be simple. But I want attribution to be maintained. If it’s not your words, not your ideas, I want to know whose they are. I don’t think Lunsford is as strict on this as I am. She views every work as collaborative, every idea as a reflection of culture as much as individual. But as an individualist, I’m taking my stand.