Wikibooks:Requests for deletion/High School Trigonometry, High School Engineering, High School Chemistry, High School Earth Science, High School Life Science, High School Biology, High School Calculus, High School Geometry, High School Probability and Statistics

== High School Trigonometry, High School Engineering, High School Chemistry, High School Earth Science, High School Life Science, High School Biology, High School Calculus, High School Geometry, High School Probability and Statistics ==

We have received an OTRS ticket, number 2015011310024438, from the CK-12 Foundation requesting that these books (which are copied from CK-12) are properly attributed to them. The relevant text of the OTRS ticket, for those without access is:
 * "...I am a science associate with the ck-12 foundation. I'm writing on behalf of ck-12 in regards to the versions of our flexbooks you have published on the wikibooks site. To begin I should say that we are extremely pleased to be featured on your site and greatly appreciate you taking the time to import our texts. We would like to ask that you attribute our content using the guidelines present on the ck-12 website. We also ask that you add this attribution to the individual concept pages; I stumbled upon a few of them and was concerned until i went back to the book and chapter pages and saw the attribution."

I can confirm the email comes from CK-12 based on the mail headers, etc. In responding to this request I have reviewed the CK-12 attribution guidelines here and noted that their license is CC-BY-NC. This license is incompatible with Wikibooks. Specifically, it does not allow commercial use, and Wikibooks does. Given this, I believe we have no choice but to delete the books.

I, or any admin, could delete these after 7 days as a copyright violation without an RFD, but given that some of them are featured books, I am raising this RFD to encourage others to check my interpretation of the license issue is correct. Note that I have named the nine books that are obviously CK-12 copies, but this deletion requirement may apply to other books from the same source - I will add them hear if I identify more. Thanks. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 13:05, 16 January 2015 (UTC)


 * The importers of the content should also be notified and even admonished for such an extensive violation. Admins should do random content cross-pollination checks as they delete the pages by selecting some random bits of text and see if they find a match in other wikibook works. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 14:04, 17 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Note that this is more a violation of the terms of use than of copyright (in the consequence that it is an unauthorized relicensing of the works).
 * One thing that I've been thinking about is the WHY we can't have non-commercial content on Wikibooks. It seems counterproductive in the primary goal of creating free content and not an issue to any of the parts involved in the work we do here. It seems simply a political decision and we may need to revisit it as it needn't be so, any primary objections would be about cross pollination but as this instance proves in a connected world that argument is very weak. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 23:43, 17 January 2015 (UTC)
 * The decision to only have material that was reusable for commercial reasons was made by the Wikimedia Foundation, it isn't something we can change locally unfortunately. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 08:52, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * This is quite interesting. A PDF of the CK-12 material was uploaded to Commons (here) in 2009. This is licensed with CC-BY-SA. It is therefore possible the material we have is permitted, if it was based on this older version. It'll need some more digging. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 12:21, 19 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I am interested in proper copyright problems where some git copies and pastes things from elsewhere without any permission. The kind of nitty gritty isn't my concern and I would be all for providing whatever attribution they want and then ignoring the problem.  If someone from the Foundation (the Wikimedia Foundation of the CK-12 Foundation) instructs us to delete then we should, otherwise we should just carry on as normal...--ЗAНИA [[Image:Flag_of_the_Isle_of_Mann.svg|15px]]talk 13:26, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

It's annoying always having to find this in Category:Candidates for speedy deletion, when are we going to take care of these books? Thanks. --atcovi (talk) 15:54, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * There are two choices: delete them, or retain them. If the latter, then every page has to have a URL linking back to the original source for attribution purposes as this has been demanded by the copyright owner. While interpretation of the "by attribution" part of the license is possible, I think the copyright holder is making a reasonable request as just providing attribution on, say, the main page of the book, is not really providing a clear link to the source. It is because of the need to edit the 100s of pages to do this that nobody has done it yet. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 12:55, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Could this be done by bot? Seems a simple though tedious task. Liam987  talk 19:05, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, easily - there's standard tasks in the pywikipedia bot framework to do this kind of thing (I used it before for adding reference sections and categories to books) and AWB could also be used. My bot has been out of service for quite a while but I could look into reviving it. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 12:43, 14 May 2015 (UTC)