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Kept

Latest comment: 18 years ago10 comments6 people in discussion

Pygmalion

The works of George Bernard Shaw are no PD (yet) because he died in 1950. Until 2020, Pygmalion cannot be part of Wikisource. 82.83.8.25 08:30, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

PD in the USA, probably. Yann 09:04, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
Yeah but Shaw is English, not American. 82.83.8.25 16:55, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
I agree this text and others by Shaw are widely available. I see no reason to disrespect UK laws and possibly cause problems for many of our contributers in this case. It can be put on Wikilivres and can be moved back over in 2020.--BirgitteSB 17:51, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
I admit no understanding why Shaw's works are PD in the United States - but if that is the case, then I think we should keep the text intact. A lot of "anal retentiveness" derives from the location of Wiki servers, if we wanted to base ourselves in w:Tokelau, we could probably host absolutely anything we wanted (not that I'm suggesting that, sorry Tokelauans) - but if we're going to use UK rulings for some things, and American for others, then I would feel justified in finding the loopholes in multiple national copyright laws that allow me to host things. (Per se, the fact the UK's Enemy Property Act of 1953 destroyed a lot of German copyrights, though some were retroactively 'fixed'). So basically, I have a very confused opinion Sherurcij (talk) (CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN) 17:58, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
There is no ambiguity; Wikisource, as part of the Wikimedia Foundation legally situated in Florida, is subject to the copyright laws of the United States. American copyright sometimes depends on the status of a work outside the United States, but it is nonetheless United States law that is applicable. —[admin] Pathoschild 23:42, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
Since Wikimedia is based in USA, works has to be free according to American law (that is the minimum requirement for Wikisource). But Wikimedia projects are not for americans only, so the copyright of the country of origin has to be considered. That is because international copyright treaties exist that requires foreign works to be protected by national copyright laws. In most countries a foreign work is not protected longer than it would be in the country of origin. If work X was created in country A it will be protected in country B. The loophole is the 1923 rule of American copyright law. It is legally possible for Wikisource to host anything that is in the public domain in US. The purpose of wikisource is not to take advantage of such loopholes to collect as many works as possible, it is to be free for as many people as possible. And therefore the copyright of the country of origin should also be considered. /82.212.68.183 09:12, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
I disagree completely with this reasoning. We don't have to follow copyright rules of every country. As far as the Foundation can legally host a work, there is no reason not to do so. If you can't legally download a work, please don't, but do not oblige everyone to do the same. Yann 10:08, 22 October 2006 (UTC)
Works that are only public domain in the United States are carefully categorized, so users in other countries can avoid using them. —[admin] Pathoschild 05:37, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep. The work is in the public domain in the United States as a work published in the United States before 1923. All such works are uncopyrighted, regardless of the nationality or date of death of the author. For more information on the criteria for public domain, see User:Pathoschild/Help:Public domain. —[admin] Pathoschild 23:42, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

Kept. —[admin] Pathoschild 05:33, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikisource:News/2006-03-11/Threat to Public Domain texts

This Wikisource news story appears to be a verbatim quote from a message board post. Although it may deserve a comment on the Scriptorium, I don't think it's really a news article unless it's heavily expanded and rewritten. I propose it be archived to the May 2006 Scriptorium archive. I've left a comment on the author's talk page, but he seems to have left the project several months ago and doesn't have an email address confirmed so that we can contact him off-wiki. —[admin] Pathoschild 06:52, 21 October 2006 (UTC)

  • Keep Even if this is a valid reason to delete something, and I question this. We should delete a news item that has been here so long. People will remember having read this months ago and expect to find it in the archives. If we are going to delete news items they need to be handled much quicker.--BirgitteSB 18:53, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep I think it's important to keep this news related to Wikisource. Yann 19:37, 21 October 2006 (UTC)
  • No consensus, kept by default. —[admin] Pathoschild 06:07, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleted

Latest comment: 18 years ago44 comments14 people in discussion

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

This consists of raw data *not* presented as part of complete published work. Such a complete published work does exist but everything except the raw data is copyrighted. The does not meet the policy for inclusion. --BirgitteSB 14:13, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

  • And in any case to call it "simply mechanical" is not entirely true. The data was generated using uniquely developed and tested machinery and the final data set had many manipulations applied to it to "re-randomize" it further. It seems like a sufficiently murky copyright issue to me. In any case there's a nice Catch-22 here: if the raw data is mechanical and not copyrightable, it probably doesn't pass WS:WWI#Reference_material; if the data is somehow creative enough to be copyrightable, we can't use it. --Fastfission 14:42, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
  • Oppose. It seems to me that there are three separate grounds under which this work is being challenged for deletion.
  1. Raw data not part of a complete published work.
  2. Violation of copyright.
  3. Reference data not suitable for inclusion.
Point number 1 is clearly inapplicable. The heart and soul of A Million Digits is the digits themselves. For more than 50 years A Million Digits has been the most widely published, distributed, and used book of random digits consulted as a publicly available, replicable source of randomization for experiments, polls, and sampling. As with any other reference book, I suspect most users don't read the preface. The entire book consists of two tables, which are included here in their entirety.
As to point number 2, copyright violation, I believe this is pretty clear. Fastfission argues that it is sufficiently "murky" because it the digits are the product uniquely developed and tested machinery (which in fact were developed and tested over a period of years). Yet this does not go to the creativity of the work, but instead invokes a "sweat of the brow" theory of copyright which has long been rejected, all the way up to the Supreme Court. Because the end result of the table is a series of random numbers in formatted in a regular grid with sequential numerical line numbers, there is no creative content that could be subject to copyright, regardless of the process used to generate them. While I won't claim to be an authority on IP law, I am a law student who is quite familiar with the caselaw in this area, and if this is the major concern for including this table I could give you several citations to relevant cases, or better yet, contact RAND Corporation and see what their position is.
Now point number 3, I concede, is much more borderline, especially given the narrowing of this criteria over the history of WikiSource. However, it is illuminating to look at the language of the policy:
Wikisource does not collect miscellaneous information unless they are part of a source text, as such information has not been previously published, is often user-compiled and unverified, and does not fit the project's goals of archiving the artistic and intellectual works created throughout history.
Some examples given are "Lists, Mathematical constants (such as digits of pi), Tables of data or results."
But here, the tables have been previously published—in print for over 50 years and widely cited—not user-compiled, and easily verifiable against a bound copy of the table. The work is clearly not artistic, but does it fit with the project's goal of archiving intellectual works? Clearly there is nothing intellectual about a table of random digits. The value, instead, is that it has been widely cited and utilized by an enormous number of intellectual works.
Unlike the digits of pi, the table is not a universal constant easily produced independently and available anywhere. Unlike election results, it is not subject to challenge or user-compiled.
Basically, I thought it would be useful to preserve this on wikisource, because while it is currently available online directly from RAND Corporation, there aren't really any online archives or libraries that are preserving it. As a source document, it is quite invaluable, because it is cited by a vast body of scholarly works, and therefore, nitpicking aside, it seems like a valuable document for inclusion on wikisource. NTK 17:39, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete. This work is borderline in terms of the reference data argument; the discussions that led to the exclusion of reference data don't make it clear whether that includes published works that consist entirely of reference data. Given the arguments that were used to justify the change, I'd say that published reference works are probably acceptable. That should be brought up on the Scriptorium, since I vaguely recall the question being raised before.

    However, the copyright situation is less borderline. All works must be unambiguously compliant with the copyright policy; murky cases are deleted. If you can obtain full permission to commercially or noncommercially reproduce and distribute the work from the presumed copyright holder, that'd resolve the copyright issue. Note that the copyright law is not clearcut on the copyrightability of data. We shouldn't accept copyright terms that depend on judgement, since judgement can be swayed in court. All works I've seen are uploaded under one of the unconditional terms, such as publication before 1928 or author's life + 70. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 05:08, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

    I have emailed the RAND Corporation to ask them what their position is. I hope that if they agree that they have no claim to the digits that you would withdraw your objection. I'm not sure if you realize that virtually all legal issues depend on "judgment," even if some are less clear-cut that others. For instance, there are thousands of scans of photographs on Commons that were not taken by users, relying on Bridgeman that a true two-dimensional reproduction is not creative or copyrightable. Any photograph of any building built in the last 70 years is predicated on the law that architects have no copyright claim on photographs of actual buildings they designed—which comes not from any statute but from American caselaw, and in fact in some foreign jurisdictions this is not the case. So your black/white rule is both overbroad and underinclusive. NTK 05:18, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
    United States copyright law is what matters to the Wikimedia Foundation, and underinclusivity is fine— there are still countless works that are unambigiously public domain that we don't have yet. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 06:03, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
  • I am removing my objection to the proposed deletion and tagging it speedy since nobody else has objected. It is still my contention that this is a fairly clear example of noncopyrightable material, but the response I have received from someone at RAND Corporation is that they don't want to concede anything, so under these circumstances I can understand not wanting to redistribute this on WikiSource. NTK 00:44, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Reference data

For details on the reference data phase-out plan, see "Plan on phasing out reference data" (Scriptorium, May 2006) and "Articles under Category:Deletion requests/Reference data" (Proposed deletions, June 2006).

Cryptography and source code

These pages are reference data, and have been slated for deletion since June 2006. No community has expressed sufficient interest in these remaining cryptography and source code pages to move them, so they should be deleted now unless someone wishes to submit them somewhere. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 02:05, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

Deleted. // [admin] Pathoschild 23:04, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Author pages for organisations and translators

Although organisations often publish works, they don't usually write them as an organisation. An author page should be created for the individual author who wrote it. Similarly, translators do not create new works in translation, despite the effort translation often entails. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 00:19, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

  • In general I would agree with you, but in the specific case of FitzGerald I disagree. First of all his translations are particularly famous. Secondly, his translations involved a significant amount of original creativity, and might arguably be considered the creation of new works based upon the originals he translated. indeed there is an argument that verse translations of verse originals always involve significant original creativity. The John Ciardi translation of Dante, for example, is in many ways an original work of poetry, and quite different from, for example, the Sayers translation of the same works. Thirdly, in many cases well-known translators are also authors in their own right (as were all the ones I have mentioned), and it can be useful to the reader to have their translations grouped with their original works when a reader wants to see how much the translator's own style may have influenced the translation. Fourthly, when a reader is seeking to find a work, in a number of cases the translator may well be better known than the original author (this would apply to FitzGerald, and to several of Robert Graves's translations, for example) and having a page for the translator can help the reader to find works of interest. Ultimately, the only reason for any page is to be helpful to the reader, and the degree to which the translator is a creator of a new work is not the issue -- the degree to which such pages help readers is. (I would note that copyright law does regard a translator as creating a new work, however.) Indeed if pages for publishers would help readers find useful texts, I don't think there is anything wrong with that, either. A work can be linked to from many pages, after all. In short i oppose the deletion of the Fitzgerald page, and would oppose deletion of other similar pages. DESiegel 21:26, 23 September 2006 (UTC)
  • 'Delete Organizations Keep Translator. Translators should have a page in the Author namespace. It is important to keep centralized information on them for copyright determination, often their body of work will interesting to keep together, and they usually pen a preface or introduction that they must credited as the author of anyways. --BirgitteSB 02:16, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
  • On looking further, I notice that one of the "organizations" is Creative commons, and the documents which are credited to the authorship of that organization are the various versions and types of the Creative Commons license. These are almost surely works created by a truly collaborative process, and it is quite likely that no clear-cut "author" can be assigned. Even if one were assigned, anyone looking for these works is far more likely to look under the name 'Creative Commons" than under the name of some staff attorney or volunteer working for Creative Commons. I therefore think this page should be kept. DESiegel 19:56, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
  • I also notice that the other listed organization page is for the "US Army Center for Military History". The sole document currently listed on that page is a report originally issued via the adjutant-general's office, and apparently comprising the combined work of hundreds of mustering officers and other military record keepers. It does not really make sense to try to assign an individual author in this case. It might be that some other broader organizational author might be assigned (such as "US Army" or "US Federal Government") but this choice seems as good as any, unless we prefer to list this document as having no author and being tied to no author page. I note that similarly laws and many other government documents have no individual authors, and might well be more easily found if appropriate governmental organizations were assigned author pages. Just who, for example, should be listed as the author of Constitution of the United States of America? I see it is currently listed as "by the government of the United States" but there is no author page. Perhaps there should be? In any case I would suggest a weak keep for "US Army Center for Military History", pending specific arguments relevant to this particular case. DESiegel 19:56, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

US Army Lineage and Honors

US Army Lineage and Honors is a large work with little organisation; I've attempted to list all the pages contained at right, but I may have missed some. I propose that it be moved to the proposed Wikisource:Workspace, where future editors can complete it at their leisure, or deleted. However, I don't think it's ready to be in the main namespace, and it doesn't seem likely to be improved in the near future. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 01:49, 23 September 2006 (UTC)


The Book of Yo

Does not appear to actually be a published work. It is from this site [1] which claims "Yoism's central text is always a draft!" so it is also an evolving work. --BirgitteSB 18:59, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

  • Comment: Are there any reliable estimates as to how many "adherents" of Yoism there are? Clearly this is a tiny, new, do-it-yourself religion. I don't think the fact that it is published online should preclude the Book of Yo. And the fact that it is a work in progress is tempered by the fact that this draft was consensed to and therefore is a frozen edition. Are there notability guidelines for this sort of thing on Wikisource? I don't have enough information to support or oppose this. NTK 23:14, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete per Wikisource's Inclusion policy, which states that "Most texts should be published in a medium that includes peer review, such as a newspaper or published book; a Usenet posting or blog entry does not qualify." (This phrase constitutes Wikisource's version of Wikipedia's notability guidelines.) // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 05:11, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep The nature of the group embraces the concept that their doctrine is evolving and will therefore never be static. --204.95.16.61 21:09, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep Being a work in progress is not a sufficient reason to delete this work. This text is essential for every yoans in the world. (translation in french: Le fait d'être une oeuvre en cours n'est certainement pas une raison suffisante pour effacer ce travail. Ce texte est essentiel pour tous les yoistes du monde) 84.98.58.73 21:37, 5 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as per Pathoschild and BirgitteSB.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 21:17, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Deleted. // [admin] Pathoschild 05:11, 9 October 2006 (UTC)


Tao Te Ching (redundant translations)

I propose that these be merged into the existing Tao Te Ching (Wikisource translation). Wikisource translations are community projects—thus the paranthetical attribution to Wikisource, rather than to User:Bob. It'd be far better to have multiple translators refine and complete a single translation. // [admin] Pathoschild (talk/map) 01:30, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. Merge them.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 18:57, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
I concur. Merge them. Then check for translation correctivity. Is this also a user translation?Feureau 06:12, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
Merging. I've moved them to I moved them to Talk:Tao Te Ching (Wikisource translation)/Edmon draft and Talk:Tao Te Ching (Wikisource translation)/Lee draft (respectively) the merge is complete. The James Legge translation doesn't seem to be a Wikisource translation. —[admin] Pathoschild 04:55, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Author:Jesus

The only work listed here was previously deleted through the consensus deletion process. IIRC we decided to not have excerpts of "dramatic pieces" from larger works. For example "St. Crispin's Day Speech" by Shakespeare as well as this example. --BirgitteSB 03:53, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleted. —[admin] Pathoschild 04:40, 30 October 2006 (UTC) 04:40, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Spell czech

I almost speedied this as outside the scope of Wikisource but I decided to other opinons here. It is just a little text that shows the inaddequecy of spell checkers.--BirgitteSB 15:05, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

I was about to do the exact same thing when I came across it on RC. But I forgot to get around to it. Delete.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 14:51, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
Deleted. —[admin] Pathoschild 04:59, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

Template:This Sister

It is not useful to have a template for the project name when {{SITENAME}} exists. /81.229.40.157 20:28, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Author:`Abdu'l-Bahá

We deleted any of the existing works he had because of copyvio reasons. In light of the fact that his works are potentially copyrighted, I see no reason why we should keep the author page.—Zhaladshar (Talk) 22:05, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleted. —[admin] Pathoschild 05:32, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

La fédération balcanique

Looks more like an encyclopedia article than a document; not sure what it is. Based on the dates mentioned, I don't think it would be in the public domain anyway. --Spangineerwp (háblame) 19:57, 19 October 2006 (UTC)

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