Hello,
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving /new/ edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to dual licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about whether we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk with you all.
So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be useful.
The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under GFDL license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and CC-by at the same time. Which is not our case.
Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would make them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part, data part...).
What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
* A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of change would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users), new edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse the whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
* As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original remains free so it should not be a big deal).
* Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be possible without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
* If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is more free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions, including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a different license choice.
So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ) and bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources -like some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in the past and of derivative works).
OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that just sound bad to you?
Thanks all, Jerome Banal
On 15/11/06, Jerome Banal jerome.banal@gmail.com wrote:
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving /new/ edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to dual licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about whether we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk with you all.
GFDL has long been considered a really awful licence for a wiki (it's suited to large slow-changing software manuals with only a few authors) and many people have spoken about switching to CC-by-sa ... but it would be such a huge task to do so that no-one's managed it on a Wikimedia project yet.
So if you can do it on one small project, that would be useful for seeing what the rest of us would need to do to achieve the same ...
I'm not sure about CC-by for the reasons you state. Why did WiktionaryZ choose CC-by rather than CC-by-sa?`
- d.
Hoi, Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two licenses that are not compatible otherwise.
It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having bogus information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of their collection was illegally copied.
For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an application for our data that we did not think about, that is success". The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions in applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does not provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the ISO-639-6.
When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or copyright, the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the license. What we want to make plane is that the data is available at WiktionaryZ for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is possible to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other) spell checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution provides.
When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ, there are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki links on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use the WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants to /integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on this.
From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of the
active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required to investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other licenses like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries. The copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary projects.
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello,
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving /new/ edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to dual licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about whether we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk with you all.
So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be useful.
The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under GFDL license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and CC-by at the same time. Which is not our case.
Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would make them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part, data part...).
What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
- A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of change
would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users), new edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse the whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
- As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary
content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original remains free so it should not be a big deal).
- Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be possible
without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
- If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is more free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions, including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a different license choice.
So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ) and bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources -like some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in the past and of derivative works).
OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that just sound bad to you?
Thanks all, Jerome Banal
<snip>
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
I do not know a great deal about the variety of licenses. What do you mean by a less Free license? What does this mean in practice?
Birgitte SB
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Birgitte SB wrote:
<snip>
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
I do not know a great deal about the variety of licenses. What do you mean by a less Free license? What does this mean in practice?
Birgitte SB
Hoi, Here a less Free license means a license that is more restrictive. The one thing required by CC-by is attribution; CC-by-sa also requires "share alike" and is thereby more restrictive. In practice it means that as long as the attribution is maintained, you can use the content. Thanks, GerardM
Hello Gerard,
Hmm, this is pretty adventurous, isn't it? GPL is not compatible with GFDL and a poll to change a license of current content is only valid if the license is entitled to the community as a collaborative work and not to contributors like in the case of Wikimedia projects. Otherwise, you should be only able to get edits made 100% by people who agreed (but I guess, you know all that already).
Also, in some countries (France for example), there is a "database-specific copyright law" that may apply on dictionaries (a structured list of synonyms, translations and all being nothing more than a database for the law) and which basically forbids to copy a "substantial amount" -both in term of data fields and entries- of a database (if you read some French: http://www.murielle-cahen.com/p_base_de_donnees.asp).
Thanks, Jerome Banal
2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two licenses that are not compatible otherwise.
It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having bogus information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of their collection was illegally copied.
For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an application for our data that we did not think about, that is success". The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions in applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does not provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the ISO-639-6.
When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or copyright, the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the license. What we want to make plane is that the data is available at WiktionaryZ for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is possible to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other) spell checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution provides.
When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ, there are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki links on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use the WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants to /integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on this.
From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of the
active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required to investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other licenses like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries. The copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary projects.
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello,
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving
/new/
edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to
dual
licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about
whether
we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk
with
you all.
So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be useful.
The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under
GFDL
license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and
CC-by
at the same time. Which is not our case.
Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would
make
them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part,
data
part...).
What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
- A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of
change
would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users),
new
edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse
the
whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
- As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary
content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original remains free so it should not be a big deal).
- Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be
possible
without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
- If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is
more
free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions, including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a
different
license choice.
So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ)
and
bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources
-like
some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in
the
past and of derivative works).
OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that
just
sound bad to you?
Thanks all, Jerome Banal
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hoi, A copyright holder can license his content. This is why several Open Source projects insist that any the ownership of a contribution that is to be merged into the core of that project is to be transferred to the organisation that maintains the project. This way they can provide both free and proprietary services based on the same code-base. The Wikimedia projects are not the same. It is possible to write a quality NPOV Wikipedia article in many ways, just compare articles in different Wikipedias and you will see what I mean. Wiktionary is very much more factual; the translation for child in Dutch is kind. The gender is neutral, the plural is kinderen. You cannot copyright this. The information in WiktionaryZ and Wiktionary is very much like this. It is very much the reason why WiktionaryZ could be developed in this way.
It is as you indicate, there are multiple copyrights involved. The MediaWiki is GPL. The database design is GPL. The database specific copyright is as indicated earlier with either with the Wikimedia Foundation or with the community of a Wiktionary project. It is not possible for a single person to lay claim to the whole of the collection.
The WiktionaryZ project is completely differently organised from the Wiktionary projects; one is relational the other flat file organised. When it comes to the data itself, for Wiktionary an article exists for each each expression spelled in a particular way. In WiktionaryZ there is a record for each occurrence of the expression per language. It is therefore impossible for WiktionaryZ to "infringe" on the license held by Wiktionary in all the ways that you specify for the "database specific copyright".
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello Gerard,
Hmm, this is pretty adventurous, isn't it? GPL is not compatible with GFDL and a poll to change a license of current content is only valid if the license is entitled to the community as a collaborative work and not to contributors like in the case of Wikimedia projects. Otherwise, you should be only able to get edits made 100% by people who agreed (but I guess, you know all that already).
Also, in some countries (France for example), there is a "database-specific copyright law" that may apply on dictionaries (a structured list of synonyms, translations and all being nothing more than a database for the law) and which basically forbids to copy a "substantial amount" -both in term of data fields and entries- of a database (if you read some French: http://www.murielle-cahen.com/p_base_de_donnees.asp).
Thanks, Jerome Banal
2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two licenses that are not compatible otherwise.
It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having bogus information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of their collection was illegally copied.
For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an application for our data that we did not think about, that is success". The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions in applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does not provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the ISO-639-6.
When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or copyright, the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the license. What we want to make plane is that the data is available at WiktionaryZ for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is possible to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other) spell checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution provides.
When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ, there are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki links on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use the WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants to /integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on this.
From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of the
active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required to investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other licenses like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries. The copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary projects.
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello,
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving
/new/
edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to
dual
licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about
whether
we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk
with
you all.
So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be useful.
The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under
GFDL
license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and
CC-by
at the same time. Which is not our case.
Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would
make
them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part,
data
part...).
What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
- A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of
change
would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users),
new
edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse
the
whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
- As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary
content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original remains free so it should not be a big deal).
- Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be
possible
without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
- If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is
more
free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions, including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a
different
license choice.
So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ)
and
bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources
-like
some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in
the
past and of derivative works).
OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that
just
sound bad to you?
Thanks all, Jerome Banal
Salut,
Thanks for this detailed explanation Gerard. So if I sum up the whole thing, actually, you can already grab a lot of contents for wikt:fr, but changing the license would made grabbing definitions somewhat safer, am I right?
Right now, reactions here seem pretty positive to try a license change and I did not see someone from the board screaming at this idea :-) Nobody is against starting a discussion/poll about this? A local one or a Meta one?
Thanks for any comment, Jerome
2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, A copyright holder can license his content. This is why several Open Source projects insist that any the ownership of a contribution that is to be merged into the core of that project is to be transferred to the organisation that maintains the project. This way they can provide both free and proprietary services based on the same code-base. The Wikimedia projects are not the same. It is possible to write a quality NPOV Wikipedia article in many ways, just compare articles in different Wikipedias and you will see what I mean. Wiktionary is very much more factual; the translation for child in Dutch is kind. The gender is neutral, the plural is kinderen. You cannot copyright this. The information in WiktionaryZ and Wiktionary is very much like this. It is very much the reason why WiktionaryZ could be developed in this way.
It is as you indicate, there are multiple copyrights involved. The MediaWiki is GPL. The database design is GPL. The database specific copyright is as indicated earlier with either with the Wikimedia Foundation or with the community of a Wiktionary project. It is not possible for a single person to lay claim to the whole of the collection.
The WiktionaryZ project is completely differently organised from the Wiktionary projects; one is relational the other flat file organised. When it comes to the data itself, for Wiktionary an article exists for each each expression spelled in a particular way. In WiktionaryZ there is a record for each occurrence of the expression per language. It is therefore impossible for WiktionaryZ to "infringe" on the license held by Wiktionary in all the ways that you specify for the "database specific copyright".
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello Gerard,
Hmm, this is pretty adventurous, isn't it? GPL is not compatible with GFDL and a poll to change a license of
current
content is only valid if the license is entitled to the community as a collaborative work and not to contributors like in the case of Wikimedia projects. Otherwise, you should be only able to get edits made 100% by people who agreed (but I guess, you know all that already).
Also, in some countries (France for example), there is a
"database-specific
copyright law" that may apply on dictionaries (a structured list of synonyms, translations and all being nothing more than a database for
the
law) and which basically forbids to copy a "substantial amount" -both in term of data fields and entries- of a database (if you read some French: http://www.murielle-cahen.com/p_base_de_donnees.asp).
Thanks, Jerome Banal
2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com >:
Hoi, Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two licenses that are not compatible otherwise.
It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having
bogus
information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of their collection was illegally copied.
For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an application for our data that we did not think about, that is success". The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions in applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does not provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the
ISO-639-6.
When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or copyright, the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the
license.
What we want to make plane is that the data is available at WiktionaryZ
for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is possible to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other) spell checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution
provides.
When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ,
there
are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki links on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use
the
WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants to /integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on
this.
From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of the
active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required
to
investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other licenses
like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries. The copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary projects.
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used
under
a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello,
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving
/new/
edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to
dual
licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about
whether
we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk
with
you all.
So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be useful.
The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under
GFDL
license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and
CC-by
at the same time. Which is not our case.
Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would
make
them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help
us
making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part,
data
part...).
What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
- A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of
change
would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users),
new
edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still
reuse
the
whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
- As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ),
Wiktionary
content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original remains free so it should not be a big deal).
- Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be
possible
without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
- If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is
more
free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less
restrictions,
including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be
more
difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a
different
license choice.
So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ)
and
bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources
-like
some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles
in
the
past and of derivative works).
OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that
just
sound bad to you?
Thanks all, Jerome Banal
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Hoi, The Wiktionary projects and communities have been and are traditionally autonomous. The different projects all have their own history, data and peculiarities. As only a community can decide for itself and the rights that exist on their "collection copyright" it is best when each project decides for themselves. This however is only possible when the Foundation does not assert the ownership that is formally theirs.
It may also be clear that some of the bigger Wiktionary projects have more content for a specific language than you will find in the Wiktionary for that language. The Dutch wiktionary is able to boast content in 341 and the English 389 languages. Much of the content is common to all projects. Integrating data in WiktionaryZ is problematic if done without sufficient planning. A lot of work will be needed to find a sensible way of doing this. Creating links to WiktionaryZ is one step in opening up the WZ data to Wiktionary.
Thanks, GerardM
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary
On 11/16/06, Jerome Banal jerome.banal@gmail.com wrote:
Salut,
Thanks for this detailed explanation Gerard. So if I sum up the whole thing, actually, you can already grab a lot of contents for wikt:fr, but changing the license would made grabbing definitions somewhat safer, am I right?
Right now, reactions here seem pretty positive to try a license change and I did not see someone from the board screaming at this idea :-) Nobody is against starting a discussion/poll about this? A local one or a Meta one?
Thanks for any comment, Jerome
2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, A copyright holder can license his content. This is why several Open Source projects insist that any the ownership of a contribution that is to be merged into the core of that project is to be transferred to the organisation that maintains the project. This way they can provide both free and proprietary services based on the same code-base. The Wikimedia projects are not the same. It is possible to write a quality NPOV Wikipedia article in many ways, just compare articles in different Wikipedias and you will see what I mean. Wiktionary is very much more factual; the translation for child in Dutch is kind. The gender is neutral, the plural is kinderen. You cannot copyright this. The information in WiktionaryZ and Wiktionary is very much like this. It is very much the reason why WiktionaryZ could be developed in this way.
It is as you indicate, there are multiple copyrights involved. The MediaWiki is GPL. The database design is GPL. The database specific copyright is as indicated earlier with either with the Wikimedia Foundation or with the community of a Wiktionary project. It is not possible for a single person to lay claim to the whole of the
collection.
The WiktionaryZ project is completely differently organised from the Wiktionary projects; one is relational the other flat file organised. When it comes to the data itself, for Wiktionary an article exists for each each expression spelled in a particular way. In WiktionaryZ there is a record for each occurrence of the expression per language. It is therefore impossible for WiktionaryZ to "infringe" on the license held by Wiktionary in all the ways that you specify for the "database specific copyright".
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello Gerard,
Hmm, this is pretty adventurous, isn't it? GPL is not compatible with GFDL and a poll to change a license of
current
content is only valid if the license is entitled to the community as a collaborative work and not to contributors like in the case of
Wikimedia
projects. Otherwise, you should be only able to get edits made 100% by people who agreed (but I guess, you know all that already).
Also, in some countries (France for example), there is a
"database-specific
copyright law" that may apply on dictionaries (a structured list of synonyms, translations and all being nothing more than a database for
the
law) and which basically forbids to copy a "substantial amount" -both
in
term of data fields and entries- of a database (if you read some
French:
http://www.murielle-cahen.com/p_base_de_donnees.asp).
Thanks, Jerome Banal
2006/11/15, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com >:
Hoi, Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two licenses that are not compatible otherwise.
It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having
bogus
information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of their collection was illegally copied.
For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an application for our data that we did not think about, that is
success".
The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions
in
applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does
not
provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the
ISO-639-6.
When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or
copyright,
the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the
license.
What we want to make plane is that the data is available at
WiktionaryZ
for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is
possible
to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other)
spell
checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution
provides.
When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ,
there
are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki
links
on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use
the
WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants
to
/integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on
this.
From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of
the
active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required
to
investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other
licenses
like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries.
The
copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary projects.
When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used
under
a less Free license, you only need to attribute.
Thanks, GerardM
Jerome Banal wrote:
Hello,
We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving
/new/
edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested)
to
dual
licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about
whether
we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and
talk
with
you all.
So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would
be
useful.
The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a
better
cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as specified above. It basically means that we can take its content
under
GFDL
license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL
and
CC-by
at the same time. Which is not our case.
Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content
would
make
them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would
help
us
making progress in the future in several possible ways (software
part,
data
part...).
What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
- A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of
change
would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with
users),
new
edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still
reuse
the
whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
- As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ),
Wiktionary
content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under
any
compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you
give
attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the
original
remains free so it should not be a big deal).
- Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be
possible
without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are
not
insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
- If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have
to
request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is
more
free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less
restrictions,
including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be
more
difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a
different
license choice.
So there are good points (better collaborative work with
WiktionaryZ)
and
bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources
-like
some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of
articles
in
the
past and of derivative works).
OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does
that
just
sound bad to you?
Thanks all, Jerome Banal
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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