Jimmy Wales wrote:
I think that GNU FDL is perfectly fine for Ultimate Wiktionary and there is no need to change the license. The license is perfectly compatible with the .DICT format, so there should be no problems at all.
I'm glad to hear that.
Thinking about how to import data from wiktionary in the ultimate wiktionary may pose a few puzzles with respect to FDL compliance, but I don't see any significant problems. The import script should keep track of who contributed to a chunk of data and take note of that fact. The history may be a little more problematic, and I think we will want to get advice on exactly how to do it.
Importing histories into Gerard's project will not remove them from the existing Wiktionaries. Simply putting a dated link to the source Wiktionary should do it. That would only become a problem if the existing Wiktionary deletes the article or otherwise makes it unworkable. In the existing transwiki technique article histories are moved with the term in question. This gives a nice list of who edited and when, but records of what changes these people made are unavailable. In some cases, particularly as regards very stubby articles, it has proved more practical to discard the transwikied material and its history completely, and start a whole new article.
But changing the license to something else would require throwing away all existing work in wiktionary, which seems quite unwise to me.
Not really, since the existing wiktionaries would continue as they have all along.
Ec