Two issues have recently arisen out of [[User:216.177.2.75]]'s (=Poccil?) recent flurry of material by Transwiki from Wikipedia to Wikisource. 1. Copyvio texts should not be transferred. In one recent situation [[Half Caste]], a recent poem, was transferred before any discussion of the copyright ever took place on Wikipedia. The original contributor (rightly or wrongly) put the poem into Wikipedia, and that is where that matter should be discussed. That is where he would (presumably) have set up a talk page where he could be approached. For Wikisource's purposes, the transferrer IS the contributor, and he is the one that represents that the material is not a copyright infringement.

In another instance [[Mens Mental Health]] there was a discussion of the copyright status on Wikipedia, which seems to have been resolved in favour of keeping the article. It was being transferred because it was judged to be a source text. (There is some question about whether the author/contributor was revising the text for inclusion on Wikipedia, which would disqualify it as a source text, but that is a secondary issue.) Of course the GFDL allows the material to be copied, and that permission should extend to Wikisource. The problem lies in the fact that the Transwiki was being performed in conjunction with the Wikipedia deletion process. The Wikipedia deletion would also have broken the link of permissions since there would no longer be an easy access to the discussion that clarified the copyright status. Again it is the transferrer who should be able to deal with such questions; making the transfer as an anonymous IP does not help that process. Wikisource should not become a dumping ground for Wikipedia's copyvio problems.

2. The other issue has to do with the entry of the list of editors on the talk page of a transwikied article. I understand perfectly that this is intended to satisfy certain requirements under the GFDL. The problem is that this is a bare list of users. This is useless without links to what those edits really were. The copyright in source works rests with the original author, and including works from the public domain does not give rise to new copyrights. Public domain also takes precedence over the GFDL which only licenses what needs to be licensed. Some edits may be copyrightable, notably eidts to introductory material. Other edits such as spelling corrections, format modifications, adding convenient headings or wikifications are not copyrightable. Wikisource needs to know exactly what was done? A "correction" of an author's idiosyncratic spelling, for example, needs to be documented. As a repository of source documents Wikisource also needs to be concerned with the integrity of the text.

Ec