On 5/19/05, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Ian Monroe wrote:
IANAL (and it sounds like one is needed) but you can't change a license without the consent of all owners of a work. So its impossible, thus Wikipedia is still using GFDL even though no one likes it. You might be able to have all /new/ work be on a different license, but thats kind of pointless and would come at a cost of people not being able to use content from Wikipedia (as-if!).
When data is imported into Ultimate Wiktionary it will first be converted beyond recognition of the orignial content. One difference you discount is that Wiktionay and Wikipedia are GNU-FDL at this moment in time. Ultimate Wiktionary will be a completely different database and as such all content can be considered new content with a new license. Why use the Wikipedia word ??
People commonly take from Wikipedia, for instance articles that don't deserve Encyclopedia entries get moved to Wiktionary. Given that its hard enough to stop people from importing dictionary.com, good luck explaining they can't use content from Wikipedia.
I still don't see how a change in license for Wiktionary or Wikipedia could ever be possible. It would be possible had people given up their copyrights to Wikimedia, but isn't what happens, everyone still has their copyrights. When an open source software project wants to change its license they have to go through and get permission from everyone/every company that has contributed and re-write the parts they don't have permission for. Quite hard in a software project, impossible for any of the Wikimedia projects.
Converting something (give a new format?) doesn't mean the original copyright holders lose their rights to it... works the same with translation into a new language. German Harry Potter might be converted beyond recognition as far as J.K. Rowling is concerned, but she still owns the copyright. And yes I know we're talking about Wiktionary, not Harry Potter, its an example. :D
Or is Ultimate Wiktionary throwing out everything from current Wiktionary?
I thought it was generally considered to be in compliance with GFDL if, for instance, on your mirror of Wikipedia you referenced back to Wikipedia.org. We'd want to keep the history online somewhere regardless, perhaps a crawl of the Wiktionaries could be done and just have it up as static content HTML files (so security and such wouldn't be an issue). When distributed Ultimate Wiktionary would referenced its own site and the Ultimate Wiktionary would link to the Wiktionary archive.
We are only talking Wiktionary here. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia. Adding History information on a talk page in the Ultimate Wiktionary DOES allow for pinpointing who contributed to an article it just does not show WHAT was contributed.
Wikipedia is another GFDL project... I was using it as an example.
I don't think the GFDL requires to show what was contributed, does it?
When we distribute content it will not be in the same format as the Ultimate Wiktionary. It will be completely seperate from it and we DO want people to use it and contribute to UW. As UW will be the source of .dict information people will update UW in order to improve their next import.
There will be not one wiktionary archive, the potential exists that all wiktionaries will be imported into UW and what is the point of keeping these as archives if they serve no purpose?
To keep a history of the project and you were concerned about giving credit, so I suggested that a static archive site be created. Not too complicated I don't think. :)
Thanks, GerardM