[Wikipedia-l] update on babylon / wikipedia content / gfdl

[Mathias Schindler]

Okay, I installed a 90-days trial version of this "babylon" software and 
I installed that "Olympic Games Glossary"

The description says:

Autor: Babylon Ltd./Wikipedia

Autor eMail: info at babylon.com

Beschreibung: Quick reference for the Summer Olympic Games. The glossary 
includes historical information, the Olympic sports and disciplines, 
country codes and general background information.
All articles are based on Wikipedia's material on the Olympic Games, and 
were edited by Babylon. This glossary is licensed under the GNU Free 
Documentation License.


(wikipedia links to wikipedia.com, GNU FDL links to gnu.org and the 
license url)
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Here's an example article:

  Olympia

Olympia, a city of ancient Greece in Elis, is known for having been the 
site of the Olympic Games in classical times. Held every olympiad (i.e. 
every four years), the Olympic Games dating back at least as far as 776 
BC. At the end of the 4th century, emperor Theodosius abolished them.

Olympia is also known for its gigantic Zeus statue made of ivory and 
gold, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, made by Phidias.

Excavation of the Olympia temple district and its surroundings, mostly 
conducted by German archeologists in the late 19th and early 20th 
century, also uncovered the Hermes of Praxiteles statue and the stadium, 
where the running contests took place.


This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License 
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html).
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Olympic Games" 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_games).


These links cannot be clicked. A local copy of the license seems to be 
missing.

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Since the Press Release was German, I made a phone call to Munich and 
asked them for a transparent copy.

Well, at least they were able to repeat the word "transparent" and they 
confirmed that this glossary is made out of wikipedia content.

A tech guy will call me back tomorrow (it's after work hours here).



Anyway, the software seems to be similar to mobipocket and  tomeraider. 
It the software scales up to the en-size of wikipedia, it might be 
interesting just to support this crappy proprietary format as long as we 
don't have a GPLed offline reading format (please correct me if I'm wrong).


I suggest we kindly tell them that it's fine and great to use wikipedia 
content and that it could be so easy to stick to the license. Requesting 
a version 1.1 and providing a transparent copy wouldn't harm them...

Mathias