As some of you know, we are working on the project [1] with Matica srpska [2]. Basically, that opens numerous possibilities and here is one of them.
My professor, a Board member of Matica srpska and one of two co-authors of the Normative Grammar of Serbian Language wants to open the Grammar.
Before I continue, I want to explain how good faith academics and university professors in Serbia treat their work in relation to the open and free access (and I suppose it's quite common for any part of the world):
* Personally, they are not motivated by money. They are well established socially, financially secure and they are mature people, not fascinated by luxury, living modest lives.
* They want their works to be as much accessible as it's possible, as well as as much used by other scientists as it's possible.
* The only financial issue in such circumstances is related to the financial safety of particular institution (in this case Matica srpska). However, financial gains from selling the books are relatively small, it's about capital works and having them is a kind of obligation of every intellectual in Serbia and it's questionable would they lose (small amount of) money by opening the content or they would actually gain. In other words, I am addressing this issue on the level of going slowly to the process and making financial analysis of every step.
* They don't really get variety of the licensing options. For them, it's practically the same if it's CC-BY or Encarta web license. If they open content, their default is that they are not counting on money from published books.
* The only issue which they have is to keep their integrity and not to present their work as their if it could be edited by anyone. (Thus, inclusion of the dictionaries will go in the form similar to "Milos, based on Serbian Ornithological Dictionary".)
And all of those things are clear while we are talking about regular content.
What we have here is the *Normative* Grammar. From my perspective, that can't go under anything which doesn't assume ND part. Obviously to me, if something is prescriptive work, it should go as-is.
However, that's my initial assumption. If there is an option to open it more freely, I'd be happy to hear the argumentation.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Matica_srpska
On Sunday, 22 February 2015, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
As some of you know, we are working on the project [1] with Matica srpska [2]. Basically, that opens numerous possibilities and here is one of them.
My professor, a Board member of Matica srpska and one of two co-authors of the Normative Grammar of Serbian Language wants to open the Grammar.
Before I continue, I want to explain how good faith academics and university professors in Serbia treat their work in relation to the open and free access (and I suppose it's quite common for any part of the world):
- Personally, they are not motivated by money. They are well
established socially, financially secure and they are mature people, not fascinated by luxury, living modest lives.
- They want their works to be as much accessible as it's possible, as
well as as much used by other scientists as it's possible.
- The only financial issue in such circumstances is related to the
financial safety of particular institution (in this case Matica srpska). However, financial gains from selling the books are relatively small, it's about capital works and having them is a kind of obligation of every intellectual in Serbia and it's questionable would they lose (small amount of) money by opening the content or they would actually gain. In other words, I am addressing this issue on the level of going slowly to the process and making financial analysis of every step.
- They don't really get variety of the licensing options. For them,
it's practically the same if it's CC-BY or Encarta web license. If they open content, their default is that they are not counting on money from published books.
- The only issue which they have is to keep their integrity and not to
present their work as their if it could be edited by anyone. (Thus, inclusion of the dictionaries will go in the form similar to "Milos, based on Serbian Ornithological Dictionary".)
And all of those things are clear while we are talking about regular content.
What we have here is the *Normative* Grammar. From my perspective, that can't go under anything which doesn't assume ND part. Obviously to me, if something is prescriptive work, it should go as-is.
I'm finding this a bit difficult to parse; am I interpreting it correctly if I read it as: because the project is to produce a prescriptive, normative grammar, there's a desired No Derivatives element of any adopted license to prevent the field from being populated with multiple, similar works that would confuse things and undermine the point of the project?
However, that's my initial assumption. If there is an option to open it more freely, I'd be happy to hear the argumentation.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Matica_srpska
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On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Oliver Keyes ironholds@gmail.com wrote:
I'm finding this a bit difficult to parse; am I interpreting it correctly if I read it as: because the project is to produce a prescriptive, normative grammar, there's a desired No Derivatives element of any adopted license to prevent the field from being populated with multiple, similar works that would confuse things and undermine the point of the project?
I would actually say: Is there a point to have a prescriptive work without ND clause? While it's quite fine for descriptive works -- and I am sure that at some point of time we'd get one of the descriptive grammars (at least the latest descriptive Syntax of Serbian Language, made by the same professor) -- I am doubtful about usefulness of a prescriptive work without ND.
Which, actually, reminds me that we definitely need a "non-free" repository. For example, we could get that grammar to be quoted in whole, but there is no sense to change it.
But, my initial point was: Am I missing something? Would there be any reason why such grammar would have sense without ND clause?
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 6:51 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Which, actually, reminds me that we definitely need a "non-free" repository. For example, we could get that grammar to be quoted in whole, but there is no sense to change it.
But, my initial point was: Am I missing something? Would there be any reason why such grammar would have sense without ND clause?
Milos,
Could we not import these works onto Wikisource in original format, where they would be preserved without permitting altering from the original? Wikisource community is a 'free-culture' equivalent of ND - altering the original is considered to be vandalism.
Then build a bot to create wiktionary pages where they dont exist, and link those wiktionary entries to the relevant Wikisource page.
That was the idea we had behind this project
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:A_dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language_of_J...
with wikt links added to pages yet to be created
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:A_dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language_of_Ja...
But I've never gotten around to writing the ws -> wikt bot , and was sort of waiting for wiktionary-wikidata integration to simplify the bot's overall structure.
-- John Vandenberg
Just a short note before I think about this: Dictionaries are free and there is a lot of sense having them under a free license (will be CC-BY). I am talking about Normative Grammar of Serbian Language here. On Feb 23, 2015 9:31 AM, "John Mark Vandenberg" jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 6:51 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Which, actually, reminds me that we definitely need a "non-free" repository. For example, we could get that grammar to be quoted in whole, but there is no sense to change it.
But, my initial point was: Am I missing something? Would there be any reason why such grammar would have sense without ND clause?
Milos,
Could we not import these works onto Wikisource in original format, where they would be preserved without permitting altering from the original? Wikisource community is a 'free-culture' equivalent of ND - altering the original is considered to be vandalism.
Then build a bot to create wiktionary pages where they dont exist, and link those wiktionary entries to the relevant Wikisource page.
That was the idea we had behind this project
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:A_dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language_of_J...
with wikt links added to pages yet to be created
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:A_dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language_of_Ja...
But I've never gotten around to writing the ws -> wikt bot , and was sort of waiting for wiktionary-wikidata integration to simplify the bot's overall structure.
-- John Vandenberg
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
But, my initial point was: Am I missing something? Would there be any reason why such grammar would have sense without ND clause?
Milos,
Could we not import these works onto Wikisource in original format, where they would be preserved without permitting altering from the original? Wikisource community is a 'free-culture' equivalent of ND - altering the original is considered to be vandalism.
This makes perfect sense to me.
But since Milos asked: In Wikisource changing the original is indeed vandalism, but somebody must notice that it's vandalism. AFAIK Wikisource doesn't have a proper way to authenticate that the document is in its original form.
The immediate geeky thing that comes to mind is to add some digital signature or checksum to the version that Matica Srpska considers the authoritative one and to declare that anything that doesn't have the same checksum is not the normative grammar.
Another example from the Free software world is TeX, which can be relevant here: It is released under a Free license, and modification is allowed, but modified versions cannot be called "TeX". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#License
Making it ND is a problem not just because of free licensing purism. Just for the sake of the example, let's say that this normative grammar is a book in four parts: pronunciation, spelling, morphology and syntax. I am teaching a course on Serbian morphology and I want to use the corresponding chapter, and no others. Printing all chapters would waste paper, but printing only one chapter would violate the ND clause. Of course, teachers all around the world do it all the time anyway, but we don't want to violate anything, right? :)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:23 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
But, my initial point was: Am I missing something? Would there be any reason why such grammar would have sense without ND clause?
Milos,
Could we not import these works onto Wikisource in original format, where they would be preserved without permitting altering from the original? Wikisource community is a 'free-culture' equivalent of ND - altering the original is considered to be vandalism.
This makes perfect sense to me.
But since Milos asked: In Wikisource changing the original is indeed vandalism, but somebody must notice that it's vandalism. AFAIK Wikisource doesn't have a proper way to authenticate that the document is in its original form.
Could you elaborate on this? If you open the links in my email, you will see that the text can be verified against the edition on file, and Wikisource projects typically have *revision* patrolling enabled to help catch incorrect changes.
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 1:23 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
Another example from the Free software world is TeX, which can be relevant here: It is released under a Free license, and modification is allowed, but modified versions cannot be called "TeX". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#License
If I'm not wrong, cc-whatever specifies that the author of the primitive work has no responsability on derivative works, and I think that a clause that limits the name of derivative works is not in contrast with the license. We are used to Wikimedia projects, where the last saved version is "the" version, but actually any version is a derivative work of the previous versions.
Making it ND is a problem not just because of free licensing purism. Just for the sake of the example, let's say that this normative grammar is a book in four parts: pronunciation, spelling, morphology and syntax. I am teaching a course on Serbian morphology and I want to use the corresponding chapter, and no others. Printing all chapters would waste paper, but printing only one chapter would violate the ND clause. Of course, teachers all around the world do it all the time anyway, but we don't want to violate anything, right? :)
Teachers most often can invoke fair use; however, for our sake, we would like to be able to go beyond that. Even without using ND clauses, we could think of some "superprotection" way of ensuring that the reference work is not modified (and whatever derivative work is something else). Cruccone
But since Milos asked: In Wikisource changing the original is indeed vandalism, but somebody must notice that it's vandalism. AFAIK
Wikisource
doesn't have a proper way to authenticate that the document is in its original form.
Could you elaborate on this? If you open the links in my email, you will see that the text can be verified against the edition on file,
Do you mean the side-by-side ProofreadPage view?
and Wikisource projects typically have *revision* patrolling enabled to help catch incorrect changes.
Revision patrolling is less bulletproof than a checksum, but if it is enough for the people who care about this normative grammar's integrity, it's certainly enough for me.
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
But since Milos asked: In Wikisource changing the original is indeed vandalism, but somebody must notice that it's vandalism. AFAIK
Wikisource
doesn't have a proper way to authenticate that the document is in its original form.
Could you elaborate on this? If you open the links in my email, you will see that the text can be verified against the edition on file,
Do you mean the side-by-side ProofreadPage view?
Yes. If the original is uploaded, we can keep the Wikisource copy in line fairly easily.
If necessary, we could even fully protect the pages. The proection policy on en.ws allows for that. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Protection_policy
and Wikisource projects typically have *revision* patrolling enabled to help catch incorrect changes.
Revision patrolling is less bulletproof than a checksum, but if it is enough for the people who care about this normative grammar's integrity, it's certainly enough for me.
How could checksums help?
and Wikisource projects typically have *revision* patrolling enabled to help catch incorrect changes.
Revision patrolling is less bulletproof than a checksum, but if it is enough for the people who care about this normative grammar's integrity, it's certainly enough for me.
How could checksums help?
Just like they help when downloading big ISO files - one would be created by the author or by somebody who can vouch for the integrity, and when it's not the same thing, then it changed.
But again, this may be just geeky over-thinking.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-02-23 14:54 GMT+02:00 John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
But since Milos asked: In Wikisource changing the original is indeed vandalism, but somebody must notice that it's vandalism. AFAIK
Wikisource
doesn't have a proper way to authenticate that the document is in its original form.
Could you elaborate on this? If you open the links in my email, you will see that the text can be verified against the edition on file,
Do you mean the side-by-side ProofreadPage view?
Yes. If the original is uploaded, we can keep the Wikisource copy in line fairly easily.
If necessary, we could even fully protect the pages. The proection policy on en.ws allows for that. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Protection_policy
and Wikisource projects typically have *revision* patrolling enabled to help catch incorrect changes.
Revision patrolling is less bulletproof than a checksum, but if it is enough for the people who care about this normative grammar's integrity, it's certainly enough for me.
How could checksums help?
-- John Vandenberg
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Unless you are an artist that wants everyone to experience your art exactly the way you produced it, ND is likely suboptimal if not harmful.
Even a normative work will have thousands of edits per page, dozens of typos or format corrections, and even future updates to add footnotes, or actual changes ('this grammar rule last changed in 2002 under guideline 2002-14b, see diff').
A reuser will take a page image of an interesting title page or table to illustrate a discussion of comparative Serbian grammars in a video montage. Someone will translate the narrative parts of the Normative Grammar into French. Someone will add structured data and related tags to each page.
Wouldn't you consider these all derivs?
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 3:34 AM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Just a short note before I think about this: Dictionaries are free and there is a lot of sense having them under a free license (will be CC-BY). I am talking about Normative Grammar of Serbian Language here. On Feb 23, 2015 9:31 AM, "John Mark Vandenberg" jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 6:51 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
Which, actually, reminds me that we definitely need a "non-free" repository. For example, we could get that grammar to be quoted in whole, but there is no sense to change it.
But, my initial point was: Am I missing something? Would there be any reason why such grammar would have sense without ND clause?
Milos,
Could we not import these works onto Wikisource in original format, where they would be preserved without permitting altering from the original? Wikisource community is a 'free-culture' equivalent of ND - altering the original is considered to be vandalism.
Then build a bot to create wiktionary pages where they dont exist, and link those wiktionary entries to the relevant Wikisource page.
That was the idea we had behind this project
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:A_dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language_of_J...
with wikt links added to pages yet to be created
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:A_dictionary_of_the_Sunda_language_of_Ja...
But I've never gotten around to writing the ws -> wikt bot , and was sort of waiting for wiktionary-wikidata integration to simplify the bot's overall structure.
-- John Vandenberg
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On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:51 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
I would actually say: Is there a point to have a prescriptive work without ND clause?
Course there is. The text of the CC licenses, for example, is under CC0; "Creative Commons" is trademarked and that trademark is used to prevent misuse (but do not prevent e.g. translations). That is a fairly standard arrangement for free documents which need to have an "official" version.
I would turn that question around: is there a point for a prescriptive work to have an ND clause? If someone wrote their alternative version of the Normative Grammar of Serbian Language from scratch, without reusing creative elements of the existing text (keep in mind that non-creative elements, which for a grammar I imagine is the majority of the content, cannot be copyrighted), would that be somehow less problematic?
After thinking about John's response, I've realized that those works should go into public domain (actually, under CC-BY, as Serbian laws don't recognize PD outside strictly defined "works not created by author" in the sense of laws and other similar works; it's been explicitly stated that "moral responsibility can't be abandoned", which creates CC-BY conditions). It's about works of public interest and they should be freely accessible.
However, Sj reminded me about the real meaning of ND and this opens two connected issues. The right address for the first one is Creative Commons, while the second one is technical and should be solved inside of Wikidata or Wikisource or even Wikiquote.
Let's forget for a moment any normative work. Take as an example any public domain work, like King James' translation of Bible is.
There is a need to quote portions of Bible for any relevant reason. It's public domain and we can quote the whole Bible if we want. But we want to be sure that the quote is genuine and not dependent on random vandalism.
So, we need a software solution to import particular quote into a Wikipedia article, while not giving a chance anyone to edit it.
Back to the licensing. Every normative work needs to be quoted in the verbatim form. But it's not ND, as you should be able to quote any statement of the work. It's not a proprietary license, as you should be able to quote the whole work if you have such need. (A sum of Wikipedia articles could easily quote the whole Normative Grammar.)
Thus, we need a kind of "verbatim license", which should say that you could quote any statement and that there is no limit in the number of quotes or percentage of particular work.
BTW, I didn't ask this question in relation to the copyright holder rights. This is related to the reliability of particular copy of prescriptive or reference work. You can't say "we guarantee that this particular quote is verbatim" if it could be edited by anyone.
And while *our* works should be edited by anyone, we have to rely on verbatim works (thus references).
The question is do we have capacity to keep such works on our projects. (There is no question if we want it, as we have Wikisource and Wikiquote.) One thing is a culture of particular Wikimedia project, the other is the need to have software and legal framework for that. On Feb 24, 2015 8:30 PM, "Gergő Tisza" gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 11:51 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
I would actually say: Is there a point to have a prescriptive work without ND clause?
Course there is. The text of the CC licenses, for example, is under CC0; "Creative Commons" is trademarked and that trademark is used to prevent misuse (but do not prevent e.g. translations). That is a fairly standard arrangement for free documents which need to have an "official" version.
I would turn that question around: is there a point for a prescriptive work to have an ND clause? If someone wrote their alternative version of the Normative Grammar of Serbian Language from scratch, without reusing creative elements of the existing text (keep in mind that non-creative elements, which for a grammar I imagine is the majority of the content, cannot be copyrighted), would that be somehow less problematic? _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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