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Hi Sally,

Am 24.07.2006 um 19:09 schrieb Sally C. Barry:

Hello Gimp-doc people!

The Glossary is the first section of the Gimp documents which I looked at. (I may need to go back to it again in the future, since I learned more about it as I went along.) There are a couple of issues that came up when I was going through the Glossary, which it might be good to discuss on the list.

So, you took the tough end of the manual to start - congrats!

I found out that the German version had many glossentries which weren't
in the English version, and also many glossentries which were quite different (and more informative) in the German version. (If you did that, Axel, thank you!)

thanks you for the flowers, but I didn't finish yet. There is still a lot of work todo in the glossary.

I tried to translate the German changes back into English. One possible
issue with doing this is that other languages may also want to make similar changes to their glossentries, and that's a lot of work!

A large number of the newer German glossentries refer to the German version of Wikipedia. Sometimes they refer the reader to Wikipedia for more information and sometimes they cite Wikipedia as the source of the information.

Roman suggested that we discuss the issues involved in this on the mailing list, so that we might come up with a useful policy.

I see these issues (for and against) the German Wikipedia references.

- Wikipedia can change at any moment, making the references invalid or doubtful.

no, there are stable links to the articles. The topics we used so far are on top of that pretty common. I don't see a reason why they should dissapear from the wikipedia.

- Citing the German Wikipedia entries in the English glossentries (or those of other languages) isn't much use because:

Since the en wikipedia is much larger than the german one there shouldn't be many articles missing in the en wikipedia compared to the german version.

- Not many non-German-language readers can understand German.

For the non german glossary entries non german wikipedia references shall be used of course.

- The corresponding non-German Wikipedia entries (for example, English) may be very different from the German one, so we can't just change the references to (English/French/Czech/etc.)

well, a definition for imaging topics shouldn't vary too much. Color is physically the same all over the world.

- We don't want to violate anyone's copyright by using their material without a reference.

Well, good point. Right now I usually copied the first paragraph of the wikipedia article and added a link. But wikipedia is free. There is no way to violate wikipedias copyright, since all the content is free ?!

- Is it really useful for the Gimp document readers to have to refer to further information somewhere else? But if not, how extensively should the Gimp docs go into specific topics?

Thats IMHO a very important point. I think it is specially in the glossary important to give a SHORT definition of the term or topic, but ALSO give a reference for people who like to know exactly whats going on in the CMYK color space model.

One possibility would be to cite Wikipedia once at the top of the Glossary for more information?

Uh, could you explain this a bit more detailed - I don't get your idea.

I think we indeed should double check the possibility of copyright issues, but AFAIK we are not doing anything evil.

Thanks for your passion,

greetings, lexA

Thank you in advance for your ideas and suggestions.

Sally in Massachusetts

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 01:09:22PM -0400, Sally C. Barry wrote:

Hello Gimp-doc people!

The Glossary is the first section of the Gimp documents which I looked at. (I may need to go back to it again in the future, since I learned more about it as I went along.) There are a couple of issues that came up when I was going through the Glossary, which it might be good to discuss on the list.

I found out that the German version had many glossentries which weren't in the English version, and also many glossentries which were quite different (and more informative) in the German version. (If you did that, Axel, thank you!)

I tried to translate the German changes back into English. One possible issue with doing this is that other languages may also want to make similar changes to their glossentries, and that's a lot of work!

Thank you very much if you start this very important and large piece of work! Its much appreciated!

A large number of the newer German glossentries refer to the German version of Wikipedia. Sometimes they refer the reader to Wikipedia for more information and sometimes they cite Wikipedia as the source of the information.

Roman suggested that we discuss the issues involved in this on the mailing list, so that we might come up with a useful policy.

I see these issues (for and against) the German Wikipedia references.

- Wikipedia can change at any moment, making the references invalid or doubtful.

Yes but IMHO those entries in the future will be (for most if not all entries) even more precise and/or completed, not absent.

- Citing the German Wikipedia entries in the English glossentries (or those of other languages) isn't much use because:

- Not many non-German-language readers can understand German.

right

- The corresponding non-German Wikipedia entries (for example, English) may be very different from the German one, so we can't just change the references to (English/French/Czech/etc.)

right

- We don't want to violate anyone's copyright by using their material without a reference.

should be no problem at all using a link to wikipedia..."All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." as gimp docs...

- Is it really useful for the Gimp document readers to have to refer to further information somewhere else?

Yes, I found it veeery interesting

But if not, how
extensively should the Gimp docs go into specific topics?

just the right! ;-)

One possibility would be to cite Wikipedia once at the top of the Glossary for more information?

Could be a good compromise. But I would ask someother in this list..

Thank you in advance for your ideas and suggestions.

The most important thing to do (IMVHO) is to create a document structure in the english version of the manual, coherent with the good german version. The en version is paramount for all the others languages since it is very useful as a common template for all translators. The quality of the en text is not so important in respect of the solid structure that the en text should have.

bye

Thanks Sally for bringing this up on our mailinglist.

On Mon, Jul 24, 2006 at 08:15:50PM +0200, Axel Wernicke wrote:

[...] cutted out

- We don't want to violate anyone's copyright by using their material without a reference.

Well, good point. Right now I usually copied the first paragraph of the wikipedia article and added a link. But wikipedia is free. There is no way to violate wikipedias copyright, since all the content is free ?!

I think so as well. From the copyright point of view we should be in a green zone ;)

- Is it really useful for the Gimp document readers to have to refer to further information somewhere else? But if not, how extensively should the Gimp docs go into specific topics?

Thats IMHO a very important point. I think it is specially in the glossary important to give a SHORT definition of the term or topic, but ALSO give a reference for people who like to know exactly whats going on in the CMYK color space model.

Yeah - I think that this point needs to be discussed. I mean, is it really important to copy content from wikipedia _or_ write our own description? The problem which strucks me for both things are:

1. Wikipedia can change and we doubled the maintainance of text (they can be wrong as well as we are) 2. Wikipedia has probably more writeres and reviewers than we have. The quality should be much more extensive and better than our glossary.

So, in which degree makes it sense for us to use or write our own glossary? I'd probably go with Axels SHORT definition on our own or cited from wikipedia. We already have an entry in our bibliography refering to wikipedia. Maybe a small note should state that the article or a paragraph is from wikipedia?

One possibility would be to cite Wikipedia once at the top of the Glossary for more information?

Uh, could you explain this a bit more detailed - I don't get your idea.

I think we indeed should double check the possibility of copyright issues, but AFAIK we are not doing anything evil.

Linking to wikipedia for each topic or glossentry doesn't make sense at all IMHO. If the reader prints out our manual, he'd find a lot of links which wouldn't help.

Greetings,