On 5/3/06, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
But might it not be a good idea to have the text of a license like the GPL even if we don't have any material under it? Would not that be well under the purpose of Wikisource?
This is an excellent question. It leads to another one: Why does Wikisource, as a project, exist? People will have many different answers to that. Here's mine.
1) All material is ready to use, because we follow a strict standard of freedom. Derivative works, commercial use, and so forth, are all permitted. This parallels the equally strict standards of Commons (I still think a case could be made for them to be merged, but that decision has long been made), and distinguishes Wikisource from other archives.
2) Metadata. Wikis are getting better at storing a wide range of relations and associations with the pages they contain. For now we have categories, templates, interwiki links, and regular links (enriched with the "What links here" feature). Projects like Semantic MediaWiki or Wikidata will eventually add even more functionality, and the collaborative editing approach makes it possible to develop reasonable "folksonomies" (yech). Wikisource will probably have the best metadata of all the source text libraries.
I count annotations as metadata. There is a wide range of NPOV annotations that are possible, especially for classical texts.
3) Translate and collaborate. I cannot emphasize enough how strongly I feel translations should become part of Wikisource's core mission. This is where wikis, with some additional functionality (easier processes for managing documents and assignments), could really shine. There is tremendous value in free translations. Many, many books which are in the free Wikisource archive are not available as free translations even in languages like German, Italian, French, let alone Russian, Farsi, or Japanese.
Wikis are well-suited for this kind of work, because you can both split the work into packages, and collaborate on refining the consistency of the end result. The same is true for proofreading scanned documents, but here, the "Distributed Proofreaders" project is already doing an admirable job. We'd have to do a lot of work on further software extensions to compete with them.
4) Limited scope archive. We cannot possibly archive every single document that might be of interest to someone in the future. Similarly to Wikimedia Commons, we need to develop criteria of usefulness. One such criterion is freedom of the content. This already drastically reduces the scope to a much more manageable amount. The material should also have been published at some point and meet general criteria of notability.
5) Incentivize freedom. Through 2) and 3), I hope that we can create a real incentive for authors to release published works freely, especially after they have gone out of print. I have decided to put the first edition of my own book under a GFDL/CC-BY-SA dual license. I did so with the hope that it might be archived and translated on Wikisource. However, de.wikisource.org has neither decided whether it wants to do translations, nor whether it wants modern texts.
I see no principal reason why Wikisource should not archive many different ''kinds'' of material as long as they meet criteria as defined in 4). For instance, I think it would be great if Wikisource became an archive for "open access" scientific content (and even data) that meets the free content definition.
But with the exception of 2), all of the points above suggest implementing a strict standard of freedom on Wikisource. Then, in answer to your above question, it follows logically that license texts that are not used as resources are, unless they are free content, inappropriate on Wikisource. What do we gain by archiving them? Due to their very nature, only armageddon could wipe out the record of the most popular licenses. If we cannot translate them, if others cannot derive new licenses from them, if we do not use them -- then we should not host them.
But, you might answer, aren't these documents in themselves philosophically compatible with our core ideas? You might make an equally strong case for mirroring all of Richard Stallman's philosophical essays. However, unless they are published, and unless they are free content, we should not do so.
Now, a library of free licenses that others can use as modular building blocks to create their own, that would be a very interesting project indeed.
All of our projects will eventually need clear definitions. There is some need for Board oversight here, or there will be what we call "semantic drift" in the WiktionaryZ project: people developing their own meanings, and implementing them as they see fit. Some will take the project away from its free content nature. Others will be too strict in limiting the scope of documents. Some will argue that a collaborative translation is a form of "original research" and should not be allowed. Again others might see annotations as unacceptable alterations of the source material.
We have seen this with Wikibooks. Intended as a place to collaboratively write textbooks, this definition clashes with a much more inclusive practice that has long tolerated materials such as game guides, jokes, or dating tips. How much do we know about the way the meaning of Wikibooks or Wikisource is interpreted in other languages than English, when we don't have a shared definition of its mission which itself is literally translated into these languages?
I'm glad that we did write and translate a mission statement for Wikinews. There was never any confusion in a local Wikinews edition about whether or not original reporting is allowable, for instance. So volunteers could immediately start working on policies for it. These _policies_ differ from language to language, but the core goals do not.
Volunteers like Birgitte can be forgiven for being frustrated when their own ideas clash with those which are seemingly well-understood by a small group of people who have little to do with the project itself, ideas which are not well-communicated to its editors. It needs to be clear why Wikisource exists, and what core policies it should follow. Certainly such a definition can be developed through a process of community consultation (as we're doing with the FCD), but it still has to be done.
Erik