Forum:Clarifying fanon ownership

A month ago, there was an administrative discussion about the deletion of fanon written by a user whose account has since been globally disabled. There was no consensus on the matter of whether or not to delete the content, but I believe a more important issue was revealed during the discussion that warrants its own discussion.

There is currently a disconnect between how The Sims Wiki treats content added to the fanon namespace, versus how the wiki's content license treats such content. For those who are unfamiliar, The Sims Wiki operates using the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license. All users who add or upload content to The Sims Wiki are assumed to accept the terms of the license and to add their content in accordance with the licensing requirements, which states that other users are allowed to use and edit their material as long as attribution to the original author is maintained.

Content licenses are of paramount importance to the ongoing survival of The Sims Wiki and other online wikis because of the concept of copyright and "ownership" of content. Most creative works that a person can create are automatically covered by copyright, giving the author some exclusive rights to use and reproduce the work (subject to fair use limitations). The problem is that copyright rights can preclude other users from using or modifying another user's content because the original author still has a legal right to exclusively use said content. Additionally, a copyright holder would have a legal right to remove their content at their discretion, or else force the wiki to remove it for them. The use of a content license like CC-BY-SA allows a wiki to keep a user's contributions and to edit those contributions because the user agreed (by clicking the 'publish' button) to upload their content under the terms of the license, which allows other users to modify and share the content with relatively little restriction. Simply put, without this license, the wiki would not be able to function. As it stands, CC-BY-SA works very well for general wiki content, where it is assumed that several authors will be combining their efforts to create a page.

Fanon content is more complicated. Currently, the way that we treat fanon differs from how our license treats it. To be clear, all content added to the wiki, even fanon, is licensed under CC-BY-SA. However, we treat fanon as if it is a user's "property," and this treatment implies that the author maintains certain rights to their "property." This issue came to a head in the aforementioned discussion, with one side generally arguing that we should treat the user's fanon contributions as property (and in a sense ignoring the CC-BY-SA license) and the other side arguing that the wiki stands to benefit by keeping the content. Technically, because of the license, the wiki is under no obligation to remove the content, even upon request (though ). But, the way that the wiki has generally (though not always) handled fanon runs contrary to the license.

Fanon is generally referred to as the author's property, and we give certain privileges to the author(s) that other users do not have. Except for minor corrections, other users are not allowed to edit the author's works. We do not restrict or govern how an author chooses to display their content (as long as it is allowed under policy and is technically possible on the wiki platform), unlike the mainspace which is more regulated. We almost always honor a user's request to delete a user's works of fanon without discussion or community consensus, even if the work is well-read or popular. Fanon works are required to display the Property template, which states that the page is owned by the author. All of these privileges would suggest to the average user that they have property rights over their fanon works. However, fanon authors actually do not have exclusive property rights, since they agreed to add the content by CC-BY-SA.

I am starting this thread as the beginning of a discussion, with the goal being to amend wiki policy in one form or another. The way we choose to proceed is open to discussion, but generally we should either move towards formally establishing that users have certain defined rights over their works, or we should move towards clarifying the relationship between fanon works, copyright and license, so that users do not assume exclusive rights of property over their works. Right now, I feel that we are being somewhat duplicitous by insinuating that fanon is property while at the same time arguing (especially in the linked-to admin discussion) that fanon is wiki content and subject to the whims of the wiki. In my eyes, we can't fairly have it both ways.

How should we proceed? --  LiR talk • blog  •  contribs 17:53, February 25, 2016 (UTC)