Friday, May 20, 2005

Licensing and mirrors

Most of the Wikimedia projects are licensed with the GNU-FDL license. It works relatively well for server content. There are many people who have issues with it, but given its rules and regulations the content is free and will forever be free. That is genuinly cool.

As I recently explained we do want to use the data in Ultimate Wiktionary for non server purposes as well. I mentioned the .dict data format. Data in this format is also used in off line usage. To create this data you create a subset of the data we hold. Given the license we should inform about every contributor to each word. This is not practical. It is practical to refer to the UW for the history of every word.

As the Ultimate Wiktionary is a new database, it is best to start with an appropriate license that is free and prevents the data from becoming unfree.

With the UW containing the free data, it does not pay to be too concerned about mirrors that host UW data. Given time and the entheausiasm of our community, the UW content will grow and therfore has the potential to outcompete this type of competition in all important ways.

Thanks,
GerardM

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