2006/4/19, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
Absolutely. It's important to have broad principles like NPOV to guide all projects, but it's also important to recognize that not all projects will have the same priorities as Wikipedia. For most of Wikisource NPOV is meaningless, as is the ability of downstream users to modify the material. If the material is modified it is no longer the same material. We can permit editing, translating and other commentary, and that will be subject to the usual rules for NPOV and modifiability, but unless there is a clear recognition of an inviolable source text it is all meaningless. When a vandal wanted change a string of digits in the middle of "Pi to 1,000,000 places" on Wikisource I suppose it could be explained in terms of the right to modify, but the result was no longer pi.
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.
Going out of our way to ensure that downstream users will be able to copy this material is ultimately an untenable position. People must accept responsibility for their own actions. We do well to warn them of possible problems, but we should have no obligation to hold their hands in the way that we would hold those of a child. We can say that we have reasonable and supportable grounds for saying that a given document is in the public domain, or that it is covered by fair use (or dealing) in the server jurisdiction, and that we cannot vouch for its legal status in some other jurisdiction. In saying this I make a specific statement that I do not consider public interest alone to be grounds for publishing most documents.
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.
I don't know that a survey will accomplish anything. I still think that dividing Wikisource into separate language communities was a big mistake; that's the one issue that most influenced me to drift away from it and back to where most of my time is now spent dealing with Wiktionary.
I find this a weird remark, because I think the decision to split Wiktionary was even worse than the one to split Wikisource...
-- Andre Engels, andreengels@gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels