Dear Erik Moeller (and others concerned),

The inclusion policies of the English Wikisource, at least, are rather well-defined. We do indeed invite users to translate texts into English, and even have a standardised title format for disambiguating multiple translations of the same work. Annotations are welcome as well, and editorial notes are considered standard. We are actively expanding our category structure with discussion, ensuring simplicity and scalability are maintained with every change. You and I seem to generally agree over what Wikisource should host and what it should allow.

However, disagreement arises over the question of what "free" is. You state that any texts that are less globally free should not be included, despite arguing in favour of fair use content on Wikipedia, because you claim that fair use content is absolutely necessary in the creation of a quality encyclopedia. However, fair use has a significant impact on the freedom of the information; consider the following quote from the template {{fair use in}}:

"However, it is believed that the use of this work in the article 'Foo': to illustrate the object in question; where no free equivalent is available or could be created that would adequately give the same information; *on the English-language Wikipedia*, hosted on servers *in the United States* by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, qualifies as fair use under *United States* copyright law. *Any other uses of this image, on Wikipedia or elsewhere, may be copyright infringement*. See Wikipedia:Fair use and Wikipedia:Copyrights."

Does that sound "free" to you?

Most English Wikisource users that have participated in discussions have expressed favour for (or, at least, no opposition to) the hosting of non-derivative works. These are considered free enough (whereas many users oppose fair use, for example), because they allow every freedom except modification. If the end-user wishes only works that can be modified, he can simply ignore the non-derivative license categories. To this purpose, we are actively developing a comprehensive structure for categorising works by license. For example, a Creative Commons license may be too restrictive for some end-user; perhaps they want public domain works only. In that case, they can browse or download from the public domain categories.

Can a user do that on Wikipedia? Can they easily choose to ignore any article that isn't entirely free, or do they have to manually sift through and examine every article? In other words, every end-user of Wikipedia must assume that every article is as free as the most unfree article. The end-user must, in fact, assume that every single article provided by Wikipedia is fair use.

Non-derivative is perfectly fine for someone seeking to expand his own archive, or print a collection of free stories; GFDL is fine for most other uses; Public domain is best for some. Wikisource allows the user to selectively decide on the degree and flavour of freedom they want. We are careful to exclude the unfree licenses (noncommercial, copyright, fair use, et cetera), but I see no reason to exclude non-derivative works.

Yours sincerely, Jesse Martin ([[User:Pathoschild]])

On 5/4/06, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

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 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Erik Moeller <eloquence@...> writes:

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 now comment about en.wikibooks. My comments are invalid for the other language editions of Wikibooks.

The page at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:What_is_Wikibooks gives little idea of what Wikibooks is for, instead giving a long list of "Wikibooks is not".

(De facto, though, the clause that "Wikibooks includes books based on Wikipedia articles" allows textbooks for any topic that has a Wikipedia article. I am thinking of abolishing this, because it could be trouble to let Wikipedia determine the scope of Wikibooks.)

From what I know, en.wikibooks and the Wikimedia Foundation do not

understand each other well. For example, on the talk page [2]

[2] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:What_is_Wikibooks

I started reading from one user:

Whichever one of us is right, however, does not really matter as it does not change the fact that the President of the Wikimedia Foundation, in his role as President of the Wikimedia Foundation, has stated that going forward computer and video game guides (and other books not meeting the criteria that they must be similar to textbooks used for accredited learning of some description) should not be on wikibooks and should (within a generous timeframe) be removed. Come the end of the day, and whether you agree with it or not, his decision is final.

... as if every edit or mailing list post from [[User:Jimbo Wales]] is a policy decree even when not explicitly stated as such!

Then from another user:

"Jimbo says" IMHO is not justification any more and not legally binding because the WMF exists specifically to deal with decisions like this. This is a policy decision that affects a good many users and is being done arbitrarily, not through some sort of community concensus process such as most of our current policies have been adopted. If this is to be changed and accepted as an official act of the WMF, it should be done as an official action by the WMF board. It hasn't been done that way.

... as if the Presidency of Wikimedia is a meaningless position!

Thus the role of the Wikimedia Foundation in Wikibooks is unknown.

It has been worse than this. On 1 March 2006, we finally adopted our naming policy:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Naming_policy

Wikibooks is now divided into textbooks. Each textbook has a page at [[Book Name]], and all other pages of that textbook must follow the slash convention: [[Book Name/Chapter Name]]. Older textbooks can use other conventions provided that the page name starts with the book name.

From 10 July 2003 to 28 February 2006, there was no naming policy, and

we still have many pages that require merging into books.

One principle though is clear, and has always remained constant since the founding of the project.

Wikibooks always was and is built around the GNU Free Documentation License (with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts). Wikibooks is free content.

(This might not be true of images and uploaded files. Some of us give little attention to local uploaded files because we use Wikimedia Commons for most things. However, two proposed policies would help: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Image_use_policy http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks:Fair_use_policy Together, they should require that all images are either free images or belong to one of four strict fair use categories.)

To contrast, http://wikitextbook.co.uk is NOT free content.

-- [[Wikibooks:en:User:Kernigh]] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kernigh