Colonel Sidney Godolphin
From Dittopedia
This page has been completely vandalised by someone who:
- believed, but did not prove, that some of the page's contents were taken from another website, and
- deleted all the rest of the content, even though they made no claim that it infringed their copyright.
People have every right to put their claim to a court of law. But if they are not prepared to do that, and they instead prefer to remove the contested material from this wiki page, they must at least be sufficiently careful to leave the material they do not contest. Otherwise it just seems like wanton destruction.
Each of the pages on this wiki that referenced the work of the sadly deceased Rowland Baker listed Mr Baker as a source. The spirit of historians is to build on each other's work, acknowledging their debts. An amateur historian may not have the time to go back to each original text, and in such instances, he must give credit to those who have.
The Web is bifurcating into sites which charge for content (such as FT.com) and sites which do not. Many of the latter just want to increase the world's knowledge—to create websites from which citizens and schools can benefit. This is the spirit of Wikipedia and many others. So it's a big shame when one of the 'freebie' sites believes it has a copyright on history, and its owners launch disruptive attacks on other websites and local libraries.
The attitude towards copyright of the estate of Rowland Baker is somewhat confusing. There are many examples on his website where he has reproduced material he cannot himself have created because they pre-date. There are even instances where his logo has been stamped on these reproductions.
In response to the attacks on this site, none of the pages (apart from this one) now references the works of Rowland Baker. His works will become (slightly) less well-known. We are all losers from this silly battle.
