On 22/05/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Easy in 1.5 - see [[m:Article validation feature]] and its associated [[m:category:Article validation]] for info and discussions. Add a field to the article ratings in Wiktionary.
I don't think this is as good a fit as some people are suggesting, since it's based entirely around *opinion* - everything to do with the quality, appropriateness, etc of an article is quite rightly regarded as a subjective decision, to be taken collectively by the community.
Whether or not a particular version of an article is distributable under a particular license (e.g. whether a given definition on a Wiktionary can be imported into a GFDL-incompatible database), on the other hand, is a completely *objective* question - the article either does, or does not, contain material contributed to by people who have not granted permission under licenses other than the GFDL.
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Of course, this actually makes it far *easier* to do the tagging - the database "knows" who has contributed to an article (or revision), so if it was "told" which users had agreed to new licensing terms, it could determine (and update) the licensing status of every revision in the database. No human would need to think about it, just ask the computer!
This leaves articles in one of three states: 1) The current revision is available under the new licensing terms (all contributors to date have agreed to adopt them). 2) The current revision incorporates material not available under the new licensing terms (contributed by users who have not agreed to adopt them). However, there is a revision before any such non-relicenses contributions were made; therefore, that revision is safe to distribute under the new terms. 3) The very first revision was contributed by a user who has not agreed to relicense; taking all subsequent revisions to be "derivative versions" of that original material, the entire article is unavailable under the new licensing scheme.
For importing to Ultimate Wiktionary, this is all you need to know - at any point in time, you can act according to the state of an "article": If 1: import the current revision If 2: import the newest revision which is available under the new terms If 3: ignore the article, and create it from scratch within the new database
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For relicensing Wikipedia, things become somewhat more complicated. Given the age of the project, and the general volume of edits and editors, there are likely to be a far higher proportion of articles in states 2 and 3, and by the nature of the content there would be a greater need to minimise the amount of effort "thrown away".
One possibility is that the license-checking tool could be made aware of page reversions - so an article in state 2 could be reverted to a relicensable revision and then re-developed. Presumably, information added later by contributors who had agreed to the terms could legally be [probably manually] re-added, as long as the bits added by people who *hadn't* agreed *weren't* included, in any form.
A key question would then be how to define the difference between a derivative work and a completely new one. How much does the article need to have changed from an older revision to claim that the newer version is not subject to the copyright of an older author? This would be particularly important for articles that were created a long time ago, and might well end up stuck in state 3 because the original author had long since ceased to be contactable - could the work put into vastly expanding Wikipedia's oldest articles be legally salvaged if everyone except their originators agreed to new terms?