Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmybot | Hacker News Reader

Mentioned in the article: As an accomplished programmer and a bit of an anarchist, Audrey Tang is a super interesting government minister. I just came back from regularly scheduled office hours, which I find really rad for a minister to have (both walk-in and by appointment office hours are available).

I wanted to compliment her g0V org on a great rewrite of the online dictionary published by the Ministry of Education: really clean URLs, using open data for translations, publishing the original data under a nice license, behind a CDN – and she commented, oh yeah I just deployed an update (!). https://www.moedict.tw/

Many years ago, Audrey also elucidated Chinese language Twitter users living in 2x the density of English users, which foreshadow's Twitter's decision in lengthening limits to 280 chars for English but not for Chinese: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875414

About g0v and a list of projects: http://g0v.asia/

View on HN

Those of us who are former Perl mongers know her for her work on Pugs [1] and tons of Perl packages on CPAN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

I’m surprised the g0v version include translations in foreign languages (and other Chinese languages). Doesn’t the ND clause of CC forbid it?

(Edit: this is not a rethorical question. I worked with this dictionary before and if it is indeed allowed to extend it I have work to do)

The website displays search results from several dictionaries: https://www.moedict.tw/about.html

I already read this page. It does not address my question. My interrogation is around the fact that mixing several dictionaries in the same page is considered a derivate product or not. Intuitively it is, so I don’t understand how this does not break the ND clause of some source material. So they must be some non obvious legal loophole I want to know about, or this website is breaching some licences.

It's a fair question. The Ministry of Education's interpretation for its use of ND clause scopes specifically to the individual items, not the compilation:

"The use of words, radicals, strokes, glyphs, phonetic readings and interpretations of the individual items in the Revised Mandarin Dictionary may not be modified or converted into simplified forms.

However, the change of the code according to the contents of the reference table provided by the Ministry of Education, as well as modifications unrelated to the specific items in the Revised Mandarin Dictionary specified above, are deemed as outside the scope of prohibition of modification."

(Source: http://resources.publicense.moe.edu.tw/reviseddict_10312.pdf )

使用者對於《重編國語辭典修訂本》個別條目的詞目、部首、筆畫、字形、音讀及釋義等內容不得為任何修改，或轉為簡化字。惟依教育部所提供對照表內容作字碼改換，或不涉及更改《重編國語辭典修訂本》個別條目所有內容之調整行為，可不被認定構成上述禁止修改條款之拘束範圍。

Thank you very much for your reply and for the source link. This is indeed different from my previous understanding, which was based mostly on English/French CC explanations website.

I'm surprised but pleased by the clause concerning the transformation in simplified characters, and all in all this is less restrictive than what I thought.

Thanks James! We just published the office hour transcript: https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2018-08-22-james-lee-visit

(as a radically transparent Minister, all visits and all internal meetings I chair are published on the internet: https://visit.pdis.tw/.)

The idea is pretty cool! NY state has an open data initiative where anyone can access public information through the portal [1]. Though I haven't seen many public services being offered using the data from the site. Having an initiative like g0v in NY would be awesome!

[1] https://data.ny.gov/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com