On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 8:06 AM, Martin Swift martin@swift.is wrote:
How about rather invite him to doing so himself. He seems quite prolific and would serve whatever project he joined well.
True, but it's a lot of work to have to go through and reformat all his work from HTML to wikitext. I have a bot that can do the translations automatically, which will be a very efficient process. Plus, I don't think all his works are suitable for Wikibooks, and I would hate for him to spend time translating things and later have us say that they aren't suitable. I think it would be far better to do the manual labor for him, and let him focus his energies on generating new content.
On a related note, he claims to have had a bad experience trying to use some of his content at Wikipedia, so he's more cautious about using his material at Wikibooks (although I've assured him that we don't bite!)
It seems like a better idea to contact him first before leeching anything. Granted, he put it in the public domain, but giving him the option of having a say whether his works belong on Wikibooks and Commons might be a more polite thing to do.
I have contacted him, and we have his blessing to start transferring materials. He asked to be kept in the loop about what we transfer and when, but besides that there's nothing he really wants. As a measure of courtesy, I'm going to post proper attribution information even though the work is PD.
--Andrew Whitworth