Hoi,
So far all Wiktionary content has been licensed under a GNU-FDL license.
With the Ultimate Wiktionary new functionality becomes a real
possibility. One of these is providing information using the .dict
format that has been described in RFC 2229. I learned from Hippietrail
that .dict can also be used to have a local dictionary on your PC. At
this moment almost every article has multiple authors it is not
realistic to require the full history with every article as the GNU-FDL
does. To grow the relevance of the Ultimate Wiktionary we do want to
expand the way in which it can be used. I learned from Erik Moeller that
we could regularly create an Ultimate Wiktionary export in the .dict
format and have these distributed with Linux distributions for instance
of with bittorrents. Again the license would be an issue it is not
feasible to export the complete history with every word.
I am not an expert on licenses. It is not really my cup of tea. As far
as I am concerned, the Ultimate Wiktionary content should remain Free
therefore a license needs a viral aspect; the data should stay free. I
really appreciate the history and therefore I do want to keep the author
information within UW. But I also want to expand the use of what we are
working on so I am not bothered about the history remaining with the
data when it finds this other use.
Changing the license within a running project is difficult. As Ultimate
Wiktionary will be a new database it is best to publish its content from
the start using a license that will enable the expanded use that is
possible with the new technology. Exporting TO the Ultimate Wiktionary
will be problematic in that it will replace many of the existing
Wiktionaries. It is not feasible to import the Wiktionary content
including the full history. It will be hard but possible to parse the
current information and enter this into UW. It is possible to mention
the persons that worked on an article on the talk page. Given the aims
of the Wikimedia projects I do not think from a moral point of view
there should be a problem converting Wiktionary data to UW and change
the license in the process. It will be impossible to convert all the
data to UW and/or maintain all the history information as only the data
that can be parsed can be entered into UW in the first place. Also there
will be a large amount of manual work to make this conversion possible
We can also convert the data to the UW, change the license, recognise
past efforts by publishing history details on the talk page and wait for
people to object. An objection would result in the removal of the work
they contributed to. This would be a pragmatic way of coping with issues.
Basically I have two questions;
*What license would be best that is FREE and allows for the expanded use
of the UW data
*Do we need to have the consent of every editor before we can export to
UW or is UW sufficiently different from Wiktionary to make it an
original work in its own right or do we need this only when we change
the license?
Thanks,
GerardM