On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:32 PM, Shiju Alex shijualexonline@gmail.com wrote:
I have a query.
What is the license of Tamil Kalaikalanjiam? Did Tamil Nadu government or Tamil Virtual University had officially announced that this Encyclopedia is released in Public Domain or in some creative commons license so that we can reuse the content. If yes, we can very well reuse the content. Otherwise it will be copyright violation. So kindly verify this.
Let us not assume that since it is published by Government it will be in pubic domain. In India that is not the case.
If it is released under a free license, it can be transcribed on Tamil Wikisource.
http://ta.wikisource.org/wiki/
The software to do transcriptions on Wikisource is not enabled on Tamil Wikisource, but it can be enabled once these messages have been translated.
http://translatewiki.net/w/i.php?title=Special%3ATranslate&task=untransl...
Here is an example of the Wikisource transcription software with a completed work:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Sanskrit_Grammar_by_Whitney_p1.djvu
and an incomplete project:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Dictionary_of_National_Biography_volume_...
In 2008 December, Kerala Government has officially announced that it is changing the license of similar encyclopedic project in Malayalam (sarvavijanakosam) to Free documentation license so that Malayalam wiki community can reuse its content to develop Malayalam wikipedia. Governmant has officially announced it. Kerala Government has also set up its own wiki (to help us) for Sarvavijanakosam and they are slowly digitizing the content and posting in its own wiki (http://mal.sarva.gov.in). They have completed some 2,900 articles now. We are reusing this content to enhance many of the existing articles. But we are not copy pasting the entire content due to various reasons. The main reason is, the content need to rewritten as per the style of wikipedia.
The wikisource transcription software is a mediawiki extension, so it could be added to mal.sarva.gov.in.
-- John Vandenberg