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

[Michael Snow]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> If you read the subjectline you will see it is not as impossible as it 
> seems. The number of contributors of Wiktionary is of a completely 
> different order of magnitude. Less people. And the problems that there 
> are when converting to the Ultimate Wiktionary are different as well. 
> Please read the original post and you will see that noone asked to 
> re-license the WIKIPEDIA content.

I read the original post, and I know what the subject line is. You might 
notice that I never limited my comments to Wikipedia alone (although I 
admit that I used the term "articles" in the general sense, which may 
have been confusing).

According to Erik Zachte's statistics, the Wiktionaries collectively 
have over 1000 registered contributors with at least ten edits. Add to 
that all of the anonymous edits and people who have made 1-9 edits, and 
you're easily talking about thousands of people to track down for 
permission to relicense. I'm guessing that's already more than Mozilla 
had to deal with, and as mentioned we're in a much more difficult 
position in terms of our ability to locate the copyright holder. The one 
advantage Wiktionary might have over Wikipedia is that in many 
instances, it's probably easier to segregate contributions that haven't 
been relicensed.

Except for possibly Wikinews, which has been in many respects a special 
case from the beginning, I also wonder whether it is desirable for us to 
be running our projects under different licensing schemes.

--Michael Snow