[WikiEN-l] 2 transwiki issues

[Ray Saintonge]

Two issues have recently arisen out of [[User:216.177.2.75]]'s 
(=Poccil?) recent flurry of material by Transwiki from Wikipedia to 
Wikisource.
    1. Copyvio texts should not be transferred.  In one recent situation 
[[Half Caste]], a recent poem, was transferred before any discussion of 
the copyright ever took place on Wikipedia.  The original contributor 
(rightly or wrongly) put the poem into Wikipedia, and that is where that 
matter should be discussed.  That is where he would (presumably) have 
set up a talk page where he could be approached.  For Wikisource's 
purposes, the transferrer IS the contributor, and he is the one that 
represents that the material is not a copyright infringement.

    In another instance [[Mens Mental Health]] there was a discussion of 
the copyright status on Wikipedia, which seems to have been resolved in 
favour of keeping the article.  It was being transferred because it was 
judged to be a source text.  (There is some question about whether the 
author/contributor was revising the text for inclusion on Wikipedia, 
which would disqualify it as a source text, but that is a secondary 
issue.)  Of course the GFDL allows the material to be copied, and that 
permission should extend to Wikisource.  The problem lies in the fact 
that the Transwiki was being performed in conjunction with the Wikipedia 
deletion process.  The Wikipedia deletion would also have broken the 
link of permissions since there would no longer be an easy access to the 
discussion that clarified the copyright status.  Again it is the 
transferrer who should be able to deal with such questions; making the 
transfer as an anonymous IP does not help that process.  Wikisource 
should not become a dumping ground for Wikipedia's copyvio problems.

    2. The other issue has to do with the entry of the list of editors 
on the talk page of a transwikied article.  I understand perfectly that 
this is intended to satisfy certain requirements under the GFDL.  The 
problem is that this is a bare list of users.  This is useless without 
links to what those edits really were.  The copyright in source works 
rests with the original author, and including works from the public 
domain does not give rise to new copyrights.  Public domain also takes 
precedence over the GFDL which only licenses what needs to be licensed.  
Some edits may be copyrightable, notably eidts to introductory 
material.  Other edits such as spelling corrections, format 
modifications, adding convenient headings or wikifications are not 
copyrightable.  Wikisource needs to know exactly what was done?  A 
"correction" of an author's idiosyncratic spelling, for example, needs 
to be documented.  As a repository of source documents Wikisource also 
needs to be concerned with the integrity of the text.

Ec