[Wiktionary-l] GNU-FDL and Ultimate Wiktionary

Mon May 30 08:04:25 UTC 2005

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Ray Saintonge wrote:
>
>> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
>>> Thinking about how to import data from wiktionary in the ultimate
>>> wiktionary may pose a few puzzles with respect to FDL compliance, but I
>>> don't see any significant problems.  The import script should keep 
>>> track
>>> of who contributed to a chunk of data and take note of that fact.  The
>>> history may be a little more problematic, and I think we will want to
>>> get advice on exactly how to do it.
>>
>> Importing histories into Gerard's project will not remove them from 
>> the existing Wiktionaries.  Simply putting a dated link to the source 
>> Wiktionary should do it.  That would only become a problem if the 
>> existing Wiktionary deletes the article or otherwise makes it 
>> unworkable.  In the existing transwiki technique article histories 
>> are moved with the term in question.  This gives a nice list of who 
>> edited and when, but records of what changes these people made are 
>> unavailable.  In some cases, particularly as regards very stubby 
>> articles, it has proved more practical to discard the transwikied 
>> material and its history completely, and start a whole new article.
>
>
> To what wiktionary would you attribute information and on what level 
> ?? When you interwiki, you expect that old style wiktionaries will 
> continue to exist.. I expect that several wiktionaries, if not all, 
> will eventually be discontinued. 

It would be attributed to the Wiktionary that supplied the information.  
I don't know what you mean by "level".The rest of it is a question of 
differing visions

> From my point of view there is nothing wrong with very stubby 
> information. The only criterium is that information is correct. 

I never expressed any opposition to stubby information.  I only said 
that it was easier to rewrite some of those stubs.

>>> But changing the license to something else would require throwing away
>>> all existing work in wiktionary, which seems quite unwise to me.
>>
>> Not really, since the existing wiktionaries would continue as they 
>> have all along.
>>
>> Ec
>
>
> Hoi,
> When a Wiktionary has its data imported into Ultimate Wiktionary and 
> when its users have migrated to the Ultimate Wiktionary as well, why 
> should they continue as they did before. It does not makes sense to 
> suggest that they would. I will not work on any Wiktionay if the work 
> of UW proves to be more efficient. Given the amount of work that I did 
> on the nl.wiktionary it can not continue as it did before. 

The amount of work that you did?  So is this a personal thing?  There's 
a lot more to life than efficiency.

> The idea that Wiktionary is similar to Wikipedia is also something 
> that can be disputed. It is more of a lemma than an article. 
> Wiktionary is in many respects like a list, the individual words 
> cannot be copyrighted. The individual translations cannot be 
> copyrighted. This is unlike Wikipedia. So if anything stubby lemmas in 
> Wiktionary are not a problem. There is also the consideration that the 
> content can come from many sources. It is therefore very difficult to 
> state in the Ultimate Wiktionary who contributed to a word because it 
> can originate from many sources. When you add for instance that a noun 
> has a particular gender, you cannot claim copyright because that fact 
> is in the public domain. 

Any proposition can be disputed.  One way to look at a dictionary is as 
an encyclopedia of and about words.  Lemma?  There is certainly more to 
a Wiktionary article than a list of headings or an intermediate 
theorem.  To say that Wiktionary is nothing more than a list is to 
completely undervalue the work that has gone into it.  Of course 
individual words cannot be copyright, and the individual translations of 
words cannot be copyright, but the way that definitions are expressed 
can be, and so can detailed explanations about how two words differ, or 
how to distinguish between false friends.  Cointent can indeed come from 
many sources, and all of those sources do need to be recognized.  Making 
note of the gender is a trivial exercise.  Documenting who made that 
alteration is not a matter of copyright, but of recognizing that some 
person made the effort to put it there.  If people make up sentences to 
illustrate a word those are copyright.

> The GNU-FDL is not intended for data like wiktionary, this license was 
> intended for manuals and it is not really appropriate for data like 
> dictionaries. There are public domain dictionaries that will give you 
> 90% of what you need to have in a modern dictionary. 

And the other 10%?  I accept that there are probably better licences for 
us.  Being FDL does not override public domain when it's applicable.

> When changing the license for Ultimate Wiktionary is a given, there 
> are several ways of dealing with complaints from people who have 
> contributed to a wiktionary.
> *You can import the same/similar data from several sources. So when a 
> wiktionary editor complains he is removed as an editor and an other 
> resource is attributed as its source.
> *This division is particularly easy for language independent stuff 
> like translations wordtypes genders etc. Meanings and etymologies are 
> more personal. 

So you would remove all the efforts of people who don't agree with your 
system.  That's not nice at all.

> Given that it is only contributors can complain and given that 
> changing the license will be done to make the UW more usefull, I doubt 
> there will be many people that will complain. I also think that it 
> will not be apreciated by the community when people complain as the 
> reason why the license would be changed is to make it easier to 
> fulfill the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation.

To claiim that you have that you have the key to fulfilling the goals of 
the Wikimedia Foundation seems a little inflated.  Openness is better 
served by having a software that minimizes the difficulties for editors.

Ec