User talk:BrianFlemming

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! By the way, you can sign your name on Talk and vote pages using three tildes, like this: ~~~. Four tildes (~~~~) produces your name and the current date. If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my Talk page. Again, welcome! --Courtkittie (talk) July 30, 2005 (UTC)

The God Who Wasn't There

I've noticed your comments on Talk:The God Who Wasn't There. You say you're the director of the movie and that you put the text quoted into the public domain. Well that's fine but we take copyright seriously on Wikipedia so we need a bit more assurance than the word of someone who typed the words "BrianFlemming" as his username into a browser window--I don't mean to impugn your honesty, but the face of the matter is that I don't have any way of knowing that you are Brian Flemming. If you've made a declaration placing the text into the public domain, and it's on a website registered in your name or controlled by you, please let's see it, or failing that we could perhaps make a fax arrangement.

Our practice on discovering a suspected copyright violation is to list it as Doc Glasgow did. He was following our policy and those who called him a vandal were wrong. We're not doing this for religious reasons, I'm an atheist and I don't know or care what he is. We're just doing it to make sure that the work of creative people is respected and not used without permission.

If we don't get the permission, it isn't a big deal. The normal practice is to rewrite the article from scratch to purge any copyright violations. The existing article can be used as a reference for this, as long as the resulting work is in no way derived from the original. The original is then deleted to purge our database and the rewrite is moved into its place. --Tony Sidaway|Talk 22:47, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

I hear you, Tony. I did provide a link to this page. It has a clear disclaimer. Also, I suggested that I be contacted through the film's official website. As a free-culture activist I find this really frustrating. I put information into the public domain. And then someone disingenously claiming to try to protect my copyright was believed without any further research. The allegation was false from the start, and there was little evidence to support it. There should at least be a requirement that someone reporting a copyvio try to contact the alleged owner and get a response. Finding a website where similar text is also posted should not be enough. That in and of itself doesn't come close to demonstrating a copyright violation, especially with the popularity of Creative Commons licenses and the like. The presumption of a violation on such scanty evidence is a bad policy. I mean, can I go to The Passion of the Christ entry and make it disappear with a copyvio allegation because of the unauthorized use of the POTC poster? Does someone then have to go get a notarized letter from Mel Gibson or Icon Productions to bring the entry back up? --BrianFlemming 03:26, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

Please call it off, it's doing more harm than good

Hi, Brian. I'm a longtime editor here, and I'm also part of a number of atheist communities online. A little while ago, Janice Rael sent me a private message telling me to vote on the two VfD pages, knowing me to be an avid Wikipedia editor, and I went to the page, and noticed that most of the people who had voted there were anonymous editors who showed a lack of understanding about the way Wikipedia works, and quite frankly often a lact of tact. As you've probably noticed by now, anonymous votes and votes by accounts created solely to vote on something aren't counted. Also, if you note the God Who Wasn't There vfd, you can clearly see that there's a consensus that the original nomination was misguided, and at the time of this writing there isn't a single delete vote. Asking people to vote keep on it is just fueling a strong resentment against the movie, and against the atheist community in general. The Atheists of Silicon Valley page is closer to deletion (which has a 70% threshold of valid votes, by the way), but the mass addition of invalid votes by people who were asked to vote on the article is fueling sentiment against it, and one valid vote was changed from keep to delete due to disgust at the campaign to keep the page. I'm urging you to tell people to call off the "keep" campaign, as it's just pushing the ASV article closer to deletion and fueling sentiment against atheists everywhere.

Thank you, Yelyos 03:30, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice, Yelyos. I put a notice on my blog and sent out an email suggesting that non-vets of Wikipedia refrain from voting. I had read here that "[a]nonymous and new users are welcome to contribute to the discussion," but I can see that it's not exactly that way in practice. (Accusations of sockpuppetry have been thrown about liberally because of "anonymous and new users" contributing to the discussion, while it's quite likely that not a single sockpuppet made a vote at all. It doesn't seem to me that the resentment was only regarding the few admittedly rude comments.) But sincere thanks for the advice. The important thing is that useful information does not get disappeared from Wikipedia, and obviously politics plays a role. --BrianFlemming 08:14, 1 August 2005 (UTC)