Wikipedia talk:Veganism parable

A "review"

Click here to read a brief review of the above parable. —Angr 19:26, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

This essay deserves more praise. Seraphim♥ 23:12, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! It got off-wiki praise from Angela Beesley Starling, who said she used it in a speech she gave. —Angr 07:07, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree, this is brilliant. –SJ+ 01:51, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

Agreed. The essay has implications for many "uncomfortable" policies here, and its reference by Angela seems to grand it a better importance rating than it has. Tezero (talk) 03:48, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

Whoops

Sorry about accidentally deleting the first para, I have no idea how I did that. Anyway, thanks for making this into an essay! Kelly ^hi! 20:17, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

No problem. I thought it was already an essay though. —Angr 20:27, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Query about meaning

What's the message behind this parable? It's rather obscure. (This question by anon has been moved to here from the article) Dbfirs 08:13, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Most of the links are piped. I think checking a few of these will clarify things, but let me know if it doesn't. Michael Slone (talk) 00:49, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

I enjoyed reading it, but I didn't learn anything. I already know that some terms are binary. It seems a very long-winded way of making an elementary point. Centrepull (talk) 15:33, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Non-free content is bad for the encyclopedia because...

I've never actually heard how that sentence ends.--Father Goose (talk) 03:55, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Because it reduces the encyclopedia's reusability. Because maintaining the non-free content to make sure it complies with policy takes time away from contributors that they could be spending improving the encyclopedia instead. Because maintaining the non-free content creates tensions and ill-will between users. Because stealing is wrong. Because including non-free content makes the slogan "The Free Encyclopedia" a lie and makes Wikipedia a laughingstock within the free content community. +Angr 09:16, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

The time lost and strife created by non-free content compliance is the most compelling reason for me that you've listed. Though I happen to think the encyclopedia is still improved by using non-free images selectively. And I can't help but think that anti-"fair use" ideology is the source of at least some of the strife and lost time.

"Theft" is hyperbole.

The free content community apparently doesn't realize that we're not a free content demonstration project. We're an encyclopedia that uses free content licensing as a means to an end. We also use fair use as a means to an end.

One of the absurdities of arguing against "fair use" images is that nobody seems to protest the use of "fair use" text as well. We'd have gaping holes in the encyclopedia if we didn't have the right to say "so-and-so said this."--Father Goose (talk) 10:15, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that's true. We don't allow the lyrics of entire songs to be reproduced here, for example, and when it comes to presenting what other people have said about a topic we're more likely to paraphrase than quote. And when we do quote text directly, it's much easier to use only a tiny fraction of the entire work than it is with images - I don't think anyone would be pleased if an article about an album included only 1/100th of the album cover. However, even I have mellowed a bit in my old age in my attitude toward fair use images: I do think we should include non-free images when the image itself is the topic of an article (i.e. articles on famous paintings and photographs). +Angr 11:03, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

As I've said before, the only way to solve the problem of all the strife caused by the pro and anti-fair use crowds is to give up the laughable presumption that we're a free content encyclopedia, and liberally allow fair use within the confines of the law. Mike Godwin has already made it clear that he's happy to wait for take down notices from copyright holders (see near bottom of [1]). As of now, we have 354,901 non-free images available on this project. That's more than one for every ten articles here. We're the world's largest online repository of non-free images. If we are free, then inline with this parable, vegetarians have meat in their meals 10 times a month or more. If we just gave up this pretense of being free, and followed the law instead, all this grief would instantly vanish. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:38, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

And so would the editors. +Angr 15:47, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

• I certainly would vanish. I know plenty of other Wikia type editors would not. Sadly, I think if you took a poll of the top 10,000 active editors here, a majority would say the NFCC policy should be voided in favor of adhering to U.S. fair use law. --Hammersoft (talk) 15:52, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

But you said a lot more than that - you said we should give up all "pretense" of being a free-content encyclopedia. That means no longer licensing content under CC-BY-SA and GFDL, but rather making all content "© Copyright Wikimedia Foundation. All rights reserved". It means other people can no longer reuse our content, so that we can use nonfree images by permission, so we wouldn't even have to worry about fair use law any more. It would also mean completely deleting and rewriting all the content, since the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses are irrevocable, but since we could charge for subscriptions, as well as generate money through advertising, the Foundation could afford to pay professionals to write the articles. That would mean no longer being a wiki, of course, so even if there were volunteer editors willing to contribute to a nonfree encyclopedia, they wouldn't be allowed to. Giving up the "pretense" of being a free-content encyclopedia basically means becoming Britannica. +Angr 16:09, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

• Hmm. Ok, giving up the pretense in the sense of controlling NFCC content to limit it in as much as possible then. --Hammersoft (talk) 16:12, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

OK I get it...up until the last paragraph

The bulk of the parable makes the point that food generally tastes better with animal products than without them. I, as "the vegan", agree with this, and conclude that such a meal is "high quality". Then, in the final paragraph my vegan self suddenly discards everything I just learned about animal products and aesthetic quality of food in favor of a completely vegan cuisine? And in my confusion, I declare this bill of fare just as "high quality" as the animal-product infested grub? Either the second group is cheating, or I have become so delusional that I can no longer tell the difference between good-tasting food and not-so-good tasting food.

To be fair, if one has had nothing but purely vegan food (free media content) their entire life, their opinion of what "high quality" food is would be a bit skewed by their experience, as they would have no idea what food with animal products (non-free content) tastes like. But like the hypothetical vegan in the parable, we have tasted of animal products (non-free content) and can tell "high quality" from "somewhat lesser quality" food (encyclopedias) quite easily. Thus the point that seems to be put forth here - you can have "equally high quality" with all-free content as with non-free content is inconsistent with the premise presented, and doesn't seem to hold up to logic. Shirtwaist ^chat 11:38, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

The point of the essay is that people who claim to hold certain principles shouldn't compromise or abandon them the instant their principles become inconvenient to them. If you're going to be a vegan, then be a vegan, and don't start eating meat, milk and eggs just because it tastes better than vegan food. If you're going to write a free-content encyclopedia, then write a free-content encyclopedia, and don't start rationalizing including nonfree content just because you think it makes the encyclopedia look prettier. And if don't want to be a vegan, or if you don't want to write a free-content encyclopedia, then be honest about what you're doing, rather than labeling it as something it isn't. —Angr (talk) 15:14, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, OK...holding to principles without compromise, however inconvenient that may be, is fine. The problem this parable has is that it doesn't include the "inconvenient" part of that equation, doesn't admit that holding to those principles comes at a cost - which in this case is not-as-good tasting food (and not-as-good quality encyclopedias). It's a bit disingenuous to make the point over and over that NFC obviously improves the product, then deliver the punchline at the end that "Wait...they're really both the same after all...so being true to our principles won't hurt!"

Unfortunately, being true to one's principles, though personally rewarding, often has a down side. I don't see that represented honestly here. Shirtwaist ^chat 23:50, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

Because I believe that the "inconvenient" part of the equation is only an illusion. I don't actually believe that a purely free-content encyclopedia is necessarily lower-quality than one that includes nonfree content. That's the point of the last paragraph: the German Wikipedia is just as high-quality an encyclopedia as the English Wikipedia, and all without non-free content. But a lot of English Wikipedians are unwilling to believe that. If your vegan chocolate cake doesn't taste as good as cake with milk and eggs in it, maybe you just haven't found the right recipe yet. Maybe you should just try harder to make a good vegan chocolate cake instead of saying, "Screw it, I'm putting milk and eggs in it, and I'll take it to the vegan dinner anyway. No one's going to sue me!" —Angr (talk) 14:43, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

We'll have to agree to disagree. I'm afraid you can count me among the disbelieving English Wikipedians, and not just for the NFC(there are significantly fewer articles there than EN.WP). For example, when given a choice between a film, famous person, or current event article (to name a few) with free and NFC images, and those without any NFC, I'll choose the former every time. That is a purely aesthetic judgment about the quality of the experience of reading an encyclopedia based on what I see. Nothing "illusory" about it. Shirtwaist ^chat 23:50, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

LOL

... not that FU and copyright are funny issues, but I did enjoy the dry satirical humor style. Ran across this as I've been researching some of the FU/NFCC etc. issues lately. Working with another editor (28bytes) on getting some sort of guide on the whole topic together. Only thing is that I'm not sure whether to have chicken or salad for dinner now. ...:)— Ched :  ?  23:04, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

• Aren't they the same? They are on Wikipedia! --Hammersoft (talk) 15:39, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Erm...

Hi all - technically this is an allegory rather than a parable ---Shirt58 (talk) 14:20, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Why isn't it a parable? Our definition says, "A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or (sometimes) a normative principle." This is a succinct story in prose which illustrate an instructive principle. The article goes on to say,

In common modern uses of "parable," though their significance is never explicitly stated, parables are not generally held to be hidden or secret but on the contrary are typically straightforward and obvious. It is the allegory that typically features hidden meanings. As H.W. Fowler puts it in Modern English Usage, the object of both parable and allegory "is to enlighten the hearer by submitting to him a case in which he has apparently no direct concern, and upon which therefore a disinterested judgment may be elicited from him." The parable, though, is more condensed than the allegory: a single principle comes to bear, and a single moral is deduced as it dawns on the reader or listener that the conclusion applies equally well to his own concerns.

The significance of this essay is not explicitly stated, but (because of the links) it's still straightforward and obvious. And it has a single principle and a single moral. —Angr (talk) 14:47, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

And the vegans are malnourished

Please see List of diseases that German speakers may suffer from. How would that figure into your parable? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 13:57, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

As the article itself says, "well-balanced vegetarian and vegan diets can meet all these nutrient requirements and are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle". —Angr (talk) 14:40, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

If so, then what's the analog to B12 pills and B12 injections? And what's the analog to imitation meat? Some imitation meat is considered vegan (such as some Morningstar Farms products), yet an imitation of a non-free work is considered non-free. For example, say someone were to remove all non-free media from the article Tarzan yell. Without a description of the yell that is a derivative work of the yell, how would the reader know that the yell he is thinking of is the same yell that the article describes? --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 16:35, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

If the nonfree content were removed from the article Tarzan yell, readers would still have the 10-point description of the sound. But I bet there are public-domain recordings of the yell. Movie trailers from that era were considered separate publications from the main move, and were generally published without copyright notice, putting them in the public domain. That's why there are so many free trailer screenshots at commons:Category:Film trailer screenshots. So if the Tarzan yell is uttered in a PD trailer, that recording of it is PD. —Angr (talk) 17:06, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Yeah \o/

• I love this parable, being both a vegetarian wannabe-vegan and free content integrist. Yeah to the writer. Léna (talk) 21:24, 25 December 2011 (UTC)
• Yup. I found this piece so well-thought and on-the-spot that I translated it in French: fr:Wikipédia:Parabole du végétalisme. Thanks for this essay. Jean-Fred (talk) 00:16, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

  Et merci pour la traduction! I like it a lot! Angr (talk) 01:27, 29 December 2011 (UTC)

• Excellent essay. --RA (talk) 19:25, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Ineffective analogy

I'm sorry, but in terms of persuading me towards a specific viewpoint, this essay was entirely unsuccessful.

First of all, the whole "vegan potluck" thing is incongruous. If the people there are vegans, then no one would be interested in eating anything containing meat, milk, or eggs. There would be no compromise on the matter.

Let's get down to the crux of the issue. At a vegan meal, if someone raises the question, "Hey, where's the vegan equivalent to chicken?" The answer is, quite simply, that there is none. So what's the logical solution? Do without.

Now, imagine a small group of Pink Floyd fans discussing The Dark Side of the Moon on its talk page, and one of them asks, "Hey, where the CC-BY-SA equivalent to the DSOTM album cover?" The answer is, quite simply, that there is none. So is the logical solution to "do without"?

Fair use exists for a reason. Album covers, movie posters, and the like aren't just there for decoration — they are an important component of their subject matter, and such things need to be dealt with using more than just text. In American copyright law, this is referred to as "transformation". Yes, we should obviously limit our usage of copyrighted content, as this remains the free encyclopedia. But the rules are not a suicide pact, and if removing a copyrighted image permitted under fair use weakens the quality of the article it is applied to, then I am not in favour of it. Kurtis ^(talk) 10:35, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, the logical solution if you want to run a free-content encyclopedia is to do without. Using nonfree content just because you can legally get away with it is not in keeping with the spirit of the free-content movement. It's like calling yourself a pacifist and then killing in self-defense: it's not illegal, but it's still a betrayal of your principles. Angr (talk) 21:12, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

I understand where you're coming from and completely respect your opinion. Although I do stand by what I said above, I can still see the hypocrisy of our slogan being "Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia" despite hosting fair use content. Kurtis ^(talk) 00:07, 22 March 2013 (UTC)

A betrayal of your principles? Of course. But is that the most important issue? Wikipedia defines pacifism as "opposition to war and violence". You may be opposed to killing someone, but do you have a choice in that matter in your example? Yes, you may indeed regret having done that in self-defense, you may not forgive yourself for it, you may consider yourself to have done wrong, but the fact of the matter is that if you had not, you would most probably be dead. And here it is now a conflict between your principles and your life. Whichever one you think is more important, you will have to sacrifice the other. And I'm pretty sure most people would choose their life here, especially when doing so was not morally wrong in the first place (there was no other way).

FWIW, I'm not convinced one bit by this parable, and probably never will be, though I certainly respect that others may hold a different view. What follows is an explanation for my personal viewpoint.

Vegans, in the first place, would not even bring any animal products there, unless they're not vegans (in which case they probably shouldn't be there). You can have a meaningful dinner without having any meat products in it. Whereas editors contributing to a free content encyclopaedia? Well, the very fact that there is a debate about it shows that there is certainly a conflict between being free and being an encyclopaedia, and that we must decide which is more important. And here it is prudent to note that WP is often described as the sum of human knowledge. This must surely include non-free images that we have no other free representation of. We do not violate our principles lightly, just as your imaginary pacifist does: if it were not their life at stake, would they kill? So we only use non-free content when we have no choice. Otherwise, we are incomplete and are by no means the sum of human knowledge – which we wish to be. Whereas being vegan and being a dinner do not conflict, because a dinner is only defined as being a meal (with no restrictions of meaning of what types of food it contains). But an encyclopaedia, to quote Wikipedia, is intended to be a "compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge". For WP, this is all branches of knowledge. And we intend to be not just a compendium of this, but a complete compendium of this.

Again, the analogy between high quality of foods and high quality of content is not valid IMHO. The former is very subjective: you said yourself in the parable that this was supposedly what "[s]ome people just fe[lt]". The latter is not, as there are certain commonly-agreed-on parameters, such as completeness, informativeness, etc., and we desire these all in an encyclopaedia. Suppose you have a non-free image of some rare silvery-coloured metal that people rarely make nowadays. Is it not better content if we have depth behind it and informativeness, showing how and why it was produced, because otherwise, being silvery as nearly all metals are, how is the reader to know that the picture isn't a fake? If this were a quoted paragraph in an article, describing the metal but not saying why and how it was produced, would you consider the article FA material (assuming all the other, non-quoted paragraphs had similar depth)? Then why should this be different for a quoted image? And are quotes a problem if they help the article somehow? Naturally the article should also include text describing the image, as a slightly worse alternative for those who ordered a WP book and can't see the non-free picture, but this cannot really stand in exactly as an exact replacement. A picture paints 1000 words. The difference is that the 1000 words, while extremely helpful in helping you understand the depth behind the picture, cannot really replace the picture itself as a description of a picture. For if it were, why is blindness treated as a disability? (Their descriptions can also be tactile, but the point applies.)

And "no one is going to sue us"? Your choice of a vegan diet is not something you will get sued over. You will not get legal action against you as a result of violating one's principles for your pacifist or your vegan. Whereas for copyrights, we certainly can get sued if we don't police copyrights severely enough! (Witness IMSLP.) How does the analogy work? Getting sued indeed doesn't have to do with anything in your parable. But it does on WP.

(I'd post up a comparison of a particularly striking non-free picture, showing both how the article would look like without it – lots of description not really giving you a clear picture of what is really being described – and with it, where the effect is strikingly obvious. But I've already written too much and I don't exactly have time to look through a full list of non-free pictures to see one that striking. Oh, and as for the not-so-striking ones, the clear picture argument still applies. You may get a different mental image from another person from reading a description. With a picture, this is not going to happen.) Double sharp (talk) 11:57, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

If you have time six years later, try drafting free versions of two articles about iconic photos of the American intervention in the Vietnamese civil war of the 1960s. These are Phan Thi Kim Phuc (aka "Napalm Girl") and the summary execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém. --Damian Yerrick (talk) 14:48, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

This post is licensed...

_{This post is licensed for dissemination to other browsers servers by means of the HTTP protocol as defined in RFCs 2616 and 2817 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. In areas where such licenses are not recognized the content of this post may - in whole or in part - be reproduced under "fair use applying recursively to enable this post to be quoted in future posts in this and other threads including, but not limited to, quotations used in the future referring to this topic and the thoughts expressed within it Permission is also granted to store this article for public retrieval under the conditions explained above, unless otherwise forbidden by local ordinance. All trademarks that may be referenced are also acknowledged. Each individual ASCII or Unicode character may reside in memory belonging to the owner of hardware, in which case the legal responsibility of this article, including deletion if found inflammatory can I stop doing this now or is anyone still reading this far, I mean it started off well, but I can't really go on typing this stuff, can I? Eventually it turns into something like the garbage you "agree to" without reading on so many webpages lorum ipso decoum est ipso lurmo groucho foo bar baz and indeed frek blah blah every alternate Tuesday blur, blah blah blech it would probably be best if I stopped doing this now so I conclude with the fact that portions of this document are invalid where void, and most of it should not be taken as legal in any way unless you really really want to get into all sorts of trouble, but the important thing is that the end of this must have LOTS AND LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS AT THE END ABOUT YOU HAVING ACCEPTED THIS LICENSE THE MOMENT YOU KNEW THE POST EXISTED AND ABOUT NOBODY HAVING ANY RIGHTS TO EVEN READ THIS LICENSE YOUR RESULTS MAY VARY PROFESSIONAL DRIVER ON CLOSED COURSE DO NOT ATTEMPT VOID WHERE PROHIBITED VOID WHERE NOT PROHIBITED MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF NUTS. --Guy Macon (talk) 05:10, 29 June 2015 (UTC)}

• @Guy Macon: I think that post was sold by weight, not by volume. Some settling of that post occurred during shipment. Yes, 5 years on someone finally read it :) --Hammersoft (talk) 13:28, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

  (Smile.) Years ago I wrote an instruction manual for calibrating a machine I had designed for testing electrohydraulic aircraft actuators. I knew that the actual instructions would be used a lot, but they also asked me to put in a "theory" section. In the middle of that section I wrote "By the way, I don't think anyone will ever actually read this. If you get to this sentence, please contact me at [contact info]." I got one call after three years. The interesting thing was that they read it in another document that had plagiarized the theory section from my document! Oh well, at least one person found it to be useful. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:34, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

• That's hysterical :) --Hammersoft (talk) 18:43, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

@Guy Macon: Someone else who actually read it. ;) Double sharp (talk) 02:29, 19 March 2021 (UTC)

Changing redirect to WikiProject Vegan

In July 2020 this WikiProject got established

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Veganism and Vegetarianism

It got ~1000 views in the past month as compared to this page getting about 40. I am redirecting WP:VEGAN from here to that WikiProject, which is more on topic. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:39, 7 September 2020 (UTC)

Reverted here. I did add a hatnote, though. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:28, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

"the prior shortcut had about 70 transclusions, and is still remembered; usurping it breaks the history." This makes sense. I would support someone changing those old links from WP:VEGAN to Wikipedia:Veganism parable. I am not proficient to automate that and it is too much for me to change manually. Blue Rasberry (talk) 11:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

Agree that VEGAN should redirect to WikiProject Veganism and Vegetarianism. I have a lot of spare time because of the pandemic, so unless someone runs a bot and replaces those links as described above in the next week or so I will fix them manually. BTW, if a Vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a Humanitarian eat? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:49, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

• If the redirect's target is changed, a {{redirect}} should be placed at the top of the target. It's going to be jarring to some people when they end up on a page they did not expect, and they will perhaps have difficulty finding their expected target. I suggest {{Redirect|WP:VEGAN|the parable about non-free content on Wikipedia|Wikipedia:Veganism parable}}--Hammersoft (talk) 19:33, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:Vegan" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikipedia:Vegan has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 June 16 § Wikipedia:Vegan until a consensus is reached. Joseph2302 (talk) 16:26, 16 June 2023 (UTC)