Wikisource talk:The Open Mishnah Project/archive 1

Old discussion from the talk page at Wikisource.org

Initial comments

I think that this material is an interesting development which, if carried to completion, would bring credit to Wikisource. My concern at this point is with copyright. That the original Hebrew is in the public domain seems obvious, but it would be helpful if you would comment on the copyright status of the English portion of these articles. Eclecticology 01:46, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Though we may disagree on some other things, on this I think you are 100% correct. The funny thing is that the problem is the opposite of what you might expect: It is not the English portion that may raise copyright issues, but the Hebrew portion.

The English portion is not so problematic because the Mishnah is, to put it simply, not considered a very "hard" text. Lots of laymen study it in the "Daily Mishnah" program. For a person with just a modicum of experience in Mishnah study, to produce a reasonable translation of just one mishnah takes no more than 5-10 minutes. So we need not worry so much about copyright here, unless new participants start quoting verbatum from published translations. That has not happened yet, and we will have to put up a clear notice to make sure that it doesn't in the future.

The Hebrew portion is a bit more problematic. Obviously, the old Hebrew texts are not copyrighted. But the digital editions of them are. For the Hebrew, I have either typed from the old editions manually and edited according to my own standards, which poses no problems and is clearly not based on anything else. In only one case (Maimonides' version of the Mishnah) did I use someone else's electronic edition, but only after getting written permission from the source (Mechon Mamre - see their website). The vowelized Hebrew versions of the Mishnah may raise problems if they are not done manually.

I hope this project can be an example of a multilingual community effort towards the joint study, translation, and editing of classical texts. It need not be limited to Mishnah - the same thing could be done for the writings of Aristotle if enough people are interested! (I am, though I don't know Greek!) Dovi 05:56, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Making an electronic version of old public domain material usually does not create a new copyright. There must be something creative to make the material copyrightable. I presume that the vowelization that were added follows established rules and traditions, so that too is not copyrightable. I am, of course, not familiar with the Hebrew site that you used. That a site adds a copyright notice to its material does not mean that everything there suddenly has a new copyright. Their copyrights would still be limited to new material such as introductions that they added themselves, and the general layout of their page.

For the English, if the translations are your own that is perfectly fine, but that should be mentioned on the headpage. If the introduction and explanations, are taken from Maimonides the proper credit should be given, and information about when the underlying English text was first published should be given. If all the explanations are from the same source, it should be enough to mention it on the headpage for your project. Getting this right from the beginning could save us from future problems. Eclecticology 06:50, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Maybe I am worrying too much about copyright? See below for more on English translations. There is a slight misunderstanding here about Maimonides: He was a great medieval scholar whose very own handwritten manuscript of the Mishnah with his commentary is still extant (in Oxford and Jerusalem). He indicated that he edited the text carefully from even older manuscripts that he consulted. So this is an important text consulted in critical editions. Dovi 22:16, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

New Participant(s)

To the new participant(s) in this project who have created the index to Berakhot and some wonderful work on several mishnayot:

Welcome and thank you so much for the material you added!

If you don't mind, please introduce yourselves by selecting a username (also so that you can be contacted on the site).

What you wrote so far is fantastic in my opinion, please keep it up.

A question on one detail: What is the source of the vowelized Hebrew mishnah? (Remember that the commercial databases are coyrighted.) In the Hebrew I only did two examples of this, which I produced half-manually through an old program called "auto-nikkud". This is very time-consuming, which is why I didn't do any more than those two examples.

Keep up the good work!

Dovi 06:16, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Vowelized Mishnah

PS - On the vowelized mishnah: Perhaps the best thing possible regarding this, since it is so tedious to do manually, would be if we actually could use an extant digital text by writing to the owner, explaining who we are, and asking for written permission. It seems to me it can't hurt to try. What do people think? Dovi 06:26, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I agree that asking wouldn't hurt, but as I said before, I suspect that that part of the material may not be covered by copyright at all. In the alternative, would there not be Hebrew OCR software that could handle this? Eclecticology 23:41, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

English Translations

The following are the published English translations and/or commentaries for the entire Mishnah: Danby, Blackman, Artscroll, and the English Kehati. (Whoops! I almost forgot Neusner.) Danby and Neusner are not meant for popular audiences, so I doubt anyone will use them. Blackman is an old, but still good popular translation, which I own a personal copy of but rarely use it any more. So I can check to make sure no texts are "lifted" from there. Artscroll and Kehati are popular today, but I don't use them, and the other person doesn't follow their style at all in the examples he submitted. So there is no problem here. The translations are our own, and as more people work on them will eventually become collective creations of the community. The explanations so far are eclectic compilations from the traditional commentaries (though they could include modern scholarship as well). Dovi 22:16, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)

From searching around I did determine that Blackman was first published in 1951, and thus still covered by copyright. I presume that the others are all more recent. I would say go ahead and add the text of Maimonides' commentary, but I don't know when it was first published in English. Despite the large amount that he wrote only his Guide to the Perplexed seems to be easily available on the net. If the contributors understand that they are publishing under GFDL we should be okay with copyright. Some may argue that this whole venture belongs in Wikibooks, but I think you're fine where you are. New commentary was forseen in the early days of Wikibooks, but that has never really gotten off the ground. Eclecticology 00:59, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Maimonides' Arabic-language commentary on the Mishnah has never been translated into English (and I certainly don't envision doing that here myself, though someone else who is extraordinarily ambitious may certainly try). I am not talking about the Arabic commentary anyway, but his Hebrew text of the Mishnah itself. The Guide is readily available on the net for the simple reason that a century-old English translation (public domain) exists. WikiBooks is for new open source course-texts (like "Chemistry 001" or at best an annotated Shakespeare), not primary texts. The latter are why we are here at WikiSource. Dovi 06:43, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I have no objection at all to the project being here. The Chemistry 001 would certainly be out of place, but an annotated Shakespeare with two side-by-side edit boxes for text and annotations would be nice. Translations too in side-by-side boxes could be interesting. Eclecticology 07:41, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Organizing the book

Hi! I noticed your book is in the "Wikibooks:" namespace. This namespace is reserved for pages dealing with Wikibooks in general or are about Wikibooks (like Wikibooks:Staff lounge or Wikibooks:Hierarchy naming scheme. I therefore suggest you to move your book to the main namespace, that is:

The Open Mishnah Project
The Open Mishnah Project/Advertisement
The Open Mishnah Project/Permissions
The Open Mishnah Project/Mishnah Tractate

and so on. Look at the ongoing discussion at Wikibooks:Hierarchy naming scheme. If you have any questions about this just ask. --Andreas 10:26, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I thought I was supposed to do that since this is the project page. But it really doesn't matter; in fact, it actually makes things much simpler to drop the "Wikibooks:" prefix from the page names.Dovi 20:57, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Sorry, I noticed later that this was a project page to another book. I don't really know where this page would best fit to. I had the impression that "Wikibooks:" was reserved for general pages, concerning more or less all Wikibooks (not just one specific one). Usually, the project page would be on the discussion page of the book (just "Talk:Mishnah"). But it seems, you have some Project page content also on the main page "Mishnah" ("How to contribute", etc.), so the distinction is not very clear to me. What about putting it all into one book? Then the Project page would be a subpage of Mishnah, like "Mishnah/Project", "Mishnah/Project/How to contribute", "Mishnah/Project/Advertisement", and so on. (at a later stage, you may want to think about gradually moving to subpage delimiters "Mishnah/Berakhot/1:1" instead of blank space "Mishnah Berakhot 1:1" also for the other pages of the Mishnah book, but that is not urgent..) --Andreas 10:02, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

OK, I guess there needs to be some sort of convention as to whether the project page for a book goes under "Wikibooks" or not. When there is a decision, it will be fine to move it (or not). Also: I agree with you that the current "Mishnah" page looks too much like the project page. I will try to fix that when I get a chance. The plan is, when there is more material, the "Mishnah" page will be a clear index to the contents of the entire book (to see what I mean, glance at the Hebrew version of the page, which catalogues over 100 individual pages).

As far as subpages: When I started this whole thing a while ago (on Hebrew Wikisource and later at Hebrew Wikibooks) I played around with a number of organizational possibilities, including subpages. In the end I came to the conclusion that the simple, official title of the single unit of text, without any other syntax, was easiest, as long as it was complemented by a useful system of links at the top of the page (a kind of navigation bar: next unit, previous unit, tractate index, Mishnah index) and categories at the bottom. (All of these pages and indexes, by the way, are also much simpler to link between languages than subpages.) It might be hard for you to navigate the many Hebrew pages that actually implement this, but if you are able to succeed despite the language barrier you will see that the hierarchy of texts is at once extremely clear and extremely easy to navigate in any direction, but in a way that would be much more difficult to do with subpages.

Because there are much fewer texts, demonstrating this is currently far less awesome in English than in Hebrew. But try clicking the links from Mishnah Berakhot 1:2 to get some sort of any idea of how this might function. Dovi 13:54, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

PS Andreas - thank you for referring me to Wikibooks:Hierarchy naming scheme. Now I can learn from people's past experience and proposals, and see where what I've tried to do fits into past experience. Actually, it seems that what I've done here, and especially in the Hebrew parallel, is "No delimiter, no book title on subpages". However, neither of the disadvantages mentioned there apply at all in the system used here.

Actually, the discussion there of the advantages and disadvantages in the various systems doesn't take into account linking between parallel texts in different languages, which would be far more cumbersome with subpages. May I suggest that the outcome be more than one possible model?Dovi 14:32, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hi Dovi, if you think Wikibooks:Hierarchy naming scheme is missing advantages or disadvantages, feel free to add them there (it is still discussion in progress). I highly welcome your input, since this is a point I was not aware of. I looked at your Hebrew pages and felt like Alice through the looking-glass (in a mirror world) :-) I just wonder, why would it be more difficult to link to a page in another language using subpages than using " " space? I don't see any conceptual difference. In the Hebrew version, would you organize the URL address line in the browser from left to right, or right to left? That is, "Book/Chapter/Section" or "Section/Chapter/Book"? Is this the difficulty you are referring to?

In Hebrew it is written backwards, but in the same order, so it doesn't cause a problem (how strange... :-)

Other than that, you are free to add your navigation line at the top and bottom as you did, regardless whether you use subpages or namespace or whatever. So there should not be any difference.

The idea of unifying the delimiter on the long run is to prepare wikibooks for further enhancement changes in the future (like all-pages-in-one print version, or automatic page-to-page navigation) which would only work, if all books have the same organizational structure, for example, subpages..). But of course, if you don't want to change your book, don't change it, and I also won't do so. As long as there is no clear outcome of the discussion and the software has not changed yet, there is no point yet in doing it. --Andreas 16:20, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Hmmm again... What you are saying is that there is really no difference in terms of ease of use between "Mishnah Berakhot 1:2" versus Mishnah/Berakhot/1:2" or "Mishnah/Berakhot/1/2". At first glance I do think it is more pleasant to the eye (and a better recognized reference) without all the slashes, but on the other hand is it really so significant at all? I'm going to have to think about this... Also do realize that there is yet a fifth level in the Hebrew that hasn't been applied in English. Without slashes it can be ignored or added at will on a navigation bar.

Anyways, there is a lot to think about here. Thanks for all the thoughtful advice. Let's keep working on this, not only for this book but because a useful (and perhaps flexible) system is important for all of them.Dovi 22:14, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)