--- Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
I agree. AFAICT, the lists had already been trimmed for things that we already had articles.
I can see a valid argument that if all we did was trim each list, then the resulting work may be considered derivative and thus not legal. More than that should be done to be safe
ASIDE: The phone book analogy I previously stated may not apply since a phone book is an unimaginative exhaustive list of names and numbers organized alphabetically, while an encyclopedia's list of topics is a tiny sub-set of human knowledge chosen for relevance. Thus the first has no copyright protection, while I can see a strong argument that the second may.
I support temporary undeletion and merging of these lists. All Encyclopedia lists if neccessary, even 1911EB (though it should be noted next to these that a 1911EB article exists, since these are PD already).
That sounds like a good plan to me. But much of the merger work should be done off-line just to be on the safe side. Several people could each take a letter in the alphabet from each list to work on off-line. Then people will work on each resulting letter-list the same way they are now once it is put onto Wikipedia.
There will be a bottleneck at the offline merger stage, but we can still do this. It will just take a bit more work and a bit longer than the way we were doing it (although merging the different lists may also reduce duplicated effort).
-- mav
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