[Foundation-l] Dual-Licensing Wiktionary :fr ?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Let me explain why WiktionaryZ allows for what are in effect two 
licenses that are not compatible otherwise.

It is not possible to copyright facts. It is however possible to 
copyright collections of facts. Every Wiktionary is a collection of 
facts but there is no single person who owns this copyright. At best 
there is a formal owner; the Wikimedia Foundation and there is a 
practical owner that is its community. There are arguments about 
definitions being copyrightable and there have been court cases about 
this. It was typically found that there is often only one way of 
defining certain things. This resulted in many dictionaries having bogus 
information that only aims to "prove" that when found, the content of 
their collection was illegally copied.

For WiktionaryZ we have defined success as: "When people find an 
application for our data that we did not think about, that is success". 
The consequence is that the data has to be available for inclusions in 
applications. This means that we aim to provide the data in STANDARD 
export formats. The data has to be identifiable to be in a recognised 
language, a recognised script and a recognised orthography. There are 
few practical standards for this. We went on a limb by choosing 
ISO-639-3. This is the best currently available but this still does not 
provide sufficient granularity. This may only arrive with the ISO-639-6.

When the data itself cannot be "protected" with licenses or copyright, 
the question is what is it that we want from the copyright, the license. 
What we want to make plane is that the data is available at WiktionaryZ 
for any purposes and that we REALLY want people to help us complete 
curate our data. This is what the CC-by allows us to do. It is possible 
to include the data necessary to build OpenOffice (or any other) spell 
checkers. These can be re-build every week. As long as the end-user 
knows how and where to fix errors and omissions, we have the 
functionality of our license. This is what mandatory attribution provides.

When a Wiktionary community wants to /cooperate /with WiktionaryZ, there 
are several ways in which this can be done. We can have interwiki links 
on the Wiktionaries articles to WiktionaryZ. When people want to use the 
WZ content in Wiktionary they can. When a Wiktionary community wants to 
/integrate /their data in WiktionaryZ integrally, they can vote on this. 
>From the WZ point of view, if there is at least a 75% majority of the 
active community in favour, it should provide enough clarity required to 
investigate the integration of the data of that Wiktionary into 
WiktionaryZ. In the past several large collections under other licenses 
like the GPL have been integrated into the different Wiktionaries. The 
copyright holders of these collections may find it in themselves to 
grant WiktionaryZ this same privilege they gave to the Wiktionary projects.

When people edit content in WiktionaryZ, these changes can be used under 
a less Free license, you only need to attribute.

Thanks,
    GerardM


Jerome Banal wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We had a small chat at Wiktionary fr: since a few days about moving /new/
> edits made on Wiktionary fr (and others some other are interested) to dual
> licensing GFDL - CC-by. After a small discussion with Anthere about whether
> we could be allowed to do it and how, she advised me to come and talk with
> you all.
>
> So maybe a little explanation of the reasons and consequences would be
> useful.
>
> The main reason we have in mind for discussing it is to have a better
> cooperation with the project WiktionaryZ, which is dual-licensed as
> specified above. It basically means that we can take its content under GFDL
> license, but that they can take only contents that are under GFDL and CC-by
> at the same time. Which is not our case.
>
> Some people thinks that helping WiktionaryZ reusing our content would make
> them progress faster, and in return, that their progresses would help us
> making progress in the future in several possible ways (software part, data
> part...).
>
>
> What would be the consequences about this license modification ?
>
> * A site license somewhat more complex. Edits prior to the date of change
> would have to remain GFDL only (unless specific agreement with users), new
> edits would be dual-licensed. This is not awful: people can still reuse the
> whole Wiktionary as if it was GFDL-only. CC-by is just a bonus.
>
> * As this is not a CC-by-SA (incompatible with WiktionaryZ), Wiktionary
> content could be taken, possibly modified and redistributed under any
> compatible licence with CC-by, which is about all as long as you give
> attribution, including non-free licenses (but of course, the original
> remains free so it should not be a big deal).
>
> * Import from Wikipedia and other GFDL-only projects will not be possible
> without prior agreement with past contributors. These imports are not
> insignificant but remain limited in amount and often in quality.
>
> * If we have to negotiate importing external source, we would have to
> request dual-licensing, as WiktionaryZ needs to, right now. CC-by is more
> free (I know, it's paradoxical; see it as "there are less restrictions,
> including the one to keep derivative free") than GFDL so it may be more
> difficult, as it is possible that the original authors can't get the
> enhancements made by someone else back in their own work due to a different
> license choice.
>
>
> So there are good points (better collaborative work with WiktionaryZ) and
> bad points (probably more difficult reusing of some external sources -like
> some other GFDL dictionaries- which brought a good amount of articles in the
> past and of derivative works).
>
> OK, I think that's the picture. What do you think about it? Should
> Wiktionary users start a poll on their projects? On Meta? Or does that just
> sound bad to you?
>
> Thanks all,
> Jerome Banal