On 4/19/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
I don't think the difference with Wikipedia is as large as you state here. Sure, one can rewrite a Wikipedia article and still have an encyclopedia article, but one can also easily make small changes that are simply incorrect. Someone who changes the digits of pi in wikisource isn't that much different from someone who changes an article on Wikipedia to state that Hitler was born in China. Do they have the right to do that? I'm not sure. But someone is definitely allowed to take a Wikipedia article, change it to say that Hitler was born in China, and publish that under the GNU/FDL. Likewise, they have the right to take the value of Pi from Wikisource, change it, and put that on their website.
I think the point of Ec's argument was missed. I believe he was getting at a slightly more fundamental point--something more along the lines of the "purpose" (kind of a bad term, I know) of the two projects: the fact that one project's personal goals might not fit another project's personal goals. In the case of Wikipedia, there is always a sense of "incompleteness" about the articles; there's always something that can be added to a Wikipedia article that can make it better. But, at some point in the evolution of a text at Wikisource, there is a point where this completeness is reached: the point in time when the text matches a previously published version of that work. Once this point is reached, there is no need to edit the text anymore, for no more modifications could be made that would leave it the same text that was previously published.
Sure, a person always has the right to edit any work on Wikisource, but the matter at stake is that remodification is not one of our goals, for after a certain point in time, Wikisource would not see anymore modifications necessary. Let's say Wikisource published a few of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe the scrolls have spelling errors in them. How important is it to be able to fix those spelling mistakes? Wikisource would say it's important NOT to fix them, since those mistakes are present in the original text and should be faithfully reproduced for any person who wants to closely study the scrolls without having to handle them in person.
Sorry about the length of this. What I'm trying to say, is that Wikisource's main goal is archiving, which Wikipedia's is not. Because of this difference, Wikipedia's goals will not work with Wikisource and Wikisource's won't work with Wikipedia. This illustrates that fact that a set of broad, kind of vague, group of over-arching goals is needed for every project to follow while each project still has the freedom to custom-tailor its immediate goals to its own aims.
And here I disagree. The right to re-publish is at the heart of the
Wikimedia philosophy. It's very nice that you ensure you have the right to republish (although I think "they haven't complained yet" isn't exactly 'ensuring a right' - I strongly advise you to take stricter guidelines), but Wikimedia was made for free material. Which means that others have the right to republish. That that is under different licenses - Wikipedia allows changing, but requires it to be under the same license, Wikisource only requires that it may be copied unchanged - is no problem. But if your material may not be reproduced by others at all, I think you are not following the spirit of Wikimedia.
This philosophy is one which causes no small amount of grief for many editors and contributors at Wikisource. Many times we've been approached by people who had excellent documents that have great value in and of themselves, but we must turn away those works because of licensing problems (maybe they're released under a non-commercial license or Wikisource could get the permission to display them on the web yet not allow other people to mercilessly copy and redistribute those texts). I will agree, republication is a great idea, but it's come at a fair price, and for the archivists at Wikisource that price is infuriating.
Why couldn't the Wikimedia philosophy be tweaked a bit to allow some works to explicitly not be redistributable? The text would of course be freely accessible to all, but no one can go put it on their own website without proper permission. The blanket statement of ensuring total, absolute freedom drastically cuts down the amount of things that can be presented to the world on the Wikimedia projects. But what's more important: allowing third parties to freely distribute our own works or being able to share valuable information that would have otherwise gone unbeknownst to the rest of the world with the stipulation that it can only be presented on a Wikimedia project?