On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 4:50 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Birgitte SB wrote:
Then there are things like creating translation and adding value to text by wikilinks.
In my opinion, translations (performed by wiki volunteers) should belong in Wikibooks and not in Wikisource, exactly because they are not (pre-existing, external) sources but creative efforts.
That is a tough call. I havent seen a lot of discussion about this.
Wikibooks is about creating new books. Wikisource is focused on old sources. If a source doesnt exist in a language, or one isnt free yet, we see it as within our scope to let contributors create a new translation. It might a five line poem, or a 200 page court document. Or a dissertation. Would all those fit within the scope of Wikibooks?
We have lots of additional infrastructure to deal with sources. An example of one of the benefits of putting "new" translations on Wikisource is the interwiki system, with our "DoubleWiki" extension to provide side by side views
http://wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:DoubleWiki_Extension
e.g.
http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Criton?match=el
Copyright legislation recognizes translators just like authors, so the copyright to a wiki-translation belongs to the translators, who can license their work. (I'm assuming that the original authors are long dead and no longer can make such claims.) Whereas most books on Wikisource are in the public domain, where none of the wiki volunteers can claim copyright and thus cannot add any free license.
Of course, however all wiki-translations are GFDL on submission. All wikisource edits are GFDL on submission, however many edits are ineligible for copyright as the submitted text is PD.
As you can imagine, Wikisource is constantly dealing with copyright law, much like Commons. The most notable example is some wiki-translations of Russian works by Osip Mandelstam, which we had to eventually delete because we couldnt determine that the Russian text was PD in the U.S. I seriously doubt that such a complex copyright issue would have been plumbed to such depths on Wikibooks:
http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Wikisource:Scriptorium&oldid=...
fwiw, Project Gutenberg also allows contributors to donate translations, however they have let them retain copyright at times.
-- John