[Foundation-l] Re: A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Rowan Collins]

On 24/05/05, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> The person who submitted an edit is not always the author of everything
> that they added: material may be copied from another article written by
> someone else, or even taken from an entirely separate resource that was
> under GFDL or a compatible license terms, which might not be compatible
> with a new license.

Hmm, that is indeed a good and rather worrying point: content imported
under the GFDL or similar and compatible licences probably *should* be
creditted as such in some way which could easily be recognised - if
not by computer, by a dedicated team of humans telling the computer.
But material copied from other articles - merges, splits, not to
mention translations - is generally treated very laxly, with hopefully
a reference in the edit summary, but not always even that.

Put it together with the thorny question of "when is a rewrite a
rewrite", and it makes you wish for a meaningful "blame"/"who added
this line" tool - though I tend to agree with the opinion that this
would be an order of magnitude harder for the free text of
encyclopedia articles than it is for source code. Although, it has to
be noted that those IBM researchers managed to get meaningful data in
their "history flow" system...

My point being, that if relicensing of this sort *were* ever attempted
on Wikipedia, it would be impossible to do it properly without some
such tool to trace where every bit of the text came from, and to check
(manually, since edit summaries aren't likely to be reliably
machine-readable) that the crucial edits were not only made by
new-license-agreeable editors, but came from sources which were
themselves new-license-compatible.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]