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

[David Gerard]

Rowan Collins (rowan.collins at gmail.com) [050526 09:03]:

> 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...


As I noted, Linus Torvalds' git treats the unit it cares about as the line,
not the file. So blame is carried between filenames. Someone may find this
worth experimenting with for the back end.


- d.