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
