[Foundation-l] A license for the Ultimate Wiktionary

[Gerard Meijssen]

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