Jane:
> I was just wondering before I read this if some sort
> of Gloranthan Wikipedia might be the way to go?
David A. Blizzard:
> However, I can see major issues with doing that and not running
> against the Issaries fan site policies.
There's the rub, I think. The mysterious tipping point at which a piece of text ceases being "fair use" of expressions of concepts from a fictional world, and starts being a "derivative work" requiring permission from the copyright holder, is a minefield for non-experts in IP law (and doubtless a gold mine for experts, at least for commercially juicier properties than Glorantha). And just to further complicate matters, several wiki hosting services have their own requirements about IP matters; for example, wikia.com requires GFDL'd content, like its "big sibling" Wikipedia; any site imposing its own ownership conditions would cause obvious issues for later moving any content elsewhere (come to that, didn't yahoogroups pull a stunt like that a while back?).
So the only practical course of action would be to get a fan-pub licence, which would be a rather open-ended thing to ask for, since 'a Gloranthan Wikipedia' could cover all manner of material. Something that confines itself to being some sort of "index" of existing material might be the most feasible thing to get approval for, rather than something that also hosts "original" material (or contains substantiative synopses of older publications).
But those matters aside(!), I personally like the idea.
Cheers,
Alex.
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