[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] We should permit Flash video playback

Sat Jul 21 17:56:59 UTC 2007

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:

>Correct me if I am wrong; but there are substantial reasons why we are
>running wikisource, and not just moving all that content to be hosted
>by Project Gutenberg, under their IP regime (choice of licence) and
>formatting conventions.
>
At an early stage of Wikisource I made the point that simply using 
Wikisource as a place to copy over Project Guttenberg text would be a 
waste of resources.  It would offer nothing new to the public, and would 
probably undermine PG's mission. 

There was a bit of opposition to Wikisource (or Project Sourceberg as it 
was first called) on the basis that it duplicated much of what PG was 
doing. 

>Infact it would be odd if wikipedia would link to "pure ascii" files as somehow
>part of our content instead of insisting that all the benefits that wikimarkup
>bestow be taken full use of.
>
Wikimarkup is our big feature in this domain.  Pure ascii does not even 
allow for any diacritics.  That's fine for purely English texts, but 
poses a problem even for English text that includes foreign language quotes.

We can edit the text (when appropriate), add notes, compare versions, 
add illustrations, make translations, cross-reference texts, make 
inter-wiki links, and perform any number of other added-value acts that 
will make our text the one that is favoured. 

>As I understand it, there are also compelling reasons why we have
>wikimedia commons, and aren't "hosting" all our pictures on flickr.
>Can somebody clarify if I have misunderstood these two cases in
>some substantial manner?
>
Having pictures on Commons should not prevent any other project from 
also hosting pictures.  How that is to be handled is essentially a 
decision which each project must make separately.  Commons has a very 
strict policy against having any fair-use material, or it could come to 
a different conclusion about whether a particular image is properly in 
the public domain.  Another project may conscientiously arrive at a 
different conclusion about the same image, and it may choose to allow 
material from that uncertain territory between the two interpretations.

For Wikisource, hosting page scans could be called the ultimate 
reference for its material.  Those scans are not easily edited, and 
having them there as references results in considerably more flexibility 
in what can be done to edit wikitexts.  I happen to feel that Wikisource 
would do better hosting its own page scans; this would certainly have 
considerable benefit in being able to co-ordinate the naming of scans 
and editable pages.

Having videos on Wikisource is theoretically possible, but given the 
bookish nature of that project I don't see much of that happening soon.

Ec