Wikisource talk:The Open Mishnah Project

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)