(Excerpt from our upcoming journal article on the First Year of g0v.tw.)
The resounding success of the December 2012 gathering prompted a successive event. The “1st Hackathon of Homesteading Commons” was held on January 27 at three cities across Taiwan, attracting one hundred on-site hackers and even more online participants.
2012 年 12 月的聚會非常成功，下一場活動於是接踵而至。「第壹次公地放領黑客松」於隔年 1 月 27 日在臺北、臺中、高雄等三個城市舉行，現場吸引了上百位黑客，遠端參加的人更多。
One of the online participants was Ping Yeh, a long-time open source advocate who immigrated to the US in 2011. In a blog article posted the night before the Hackathon, he called upon g0v hackers to liberate the Revised Ministry of Education Dictionary from the Ministry’s archaic website into “an open API, with full index and search capabilities, free for all individuals and companies to use.”
其中一名線上參與者是葉平，他是開放源碼的長期倡導者，在 2011 年移居美國。他在黑客松前夕發布了一篇部落格文章，呼籲零時政府的黑客把重編國語辭典修訂本從教育部的老舊網站系統解放，以便用開放的文字 API 釋放出來，加上索引和搜尋的功能，讓任何想加值的個人或公司都可以使用。
With over 160 thousand entries, rich etymologies, and full references to classical texts, the MoE Dictionary has been the authoritative definition of the Traditional Chinese language since it was first published in 1945. The digital-only Revised edition launched in 1996 as website and attracted nearly 200 million visits—even with almost no upgrades—over the next seventeen years.
教育部國語辭典擁有超過 16 萬筆詞彙，包含豐富的歷史用法，充分引用經典文本作為書證。自 1945 年首次出版以來，它一直是繁體中文的權威定義參考。在 1996 年推出的網頁版重編國語辭典修訂本，即使幾乎未曾升級，卻在接下來 17 年吸引了近 2 億人次使用。
What would it take to bring the Revised MoE into the modern web of permanent URLs, Unicode text, and mobile devices? Yeh argued that the Ministry of Education ought to provide unencumbered dictionary data and let citizens take care of the presentation. Since the Ministry took the opposite stance by explicitly disallowing redistribution, Yeh pledged to personally design the required data structure so civic hackers could scrape the dictionary data to “reclaim our language.”
如何才能把這部辭典發展成擁有固定網址的現代網站、使用 Unicode 字碼，甚至適用於行動裝置？葉平認為，教育部應提供開放的辭典資料，讓民眾自行決定如何呈現這些內容。由於教育部持相反立場，明確禁止重製，葉平決定親自動手設計所需的資料結構，讓公民黑客可以擷取辭典資料以還文於民
。
More than 30 participants on the MoeDict team—formed during the Hackathon—worked overnight. The next day, the team published not only complete data in JSON and SQL formats, but also prototyped websites and apps for all major platforms. With the recent memory of Real Price Map’s closure, we forestalled copyright issues with two legal devices:
- By claiming Fair Use of government-produced data under Article 50 of Taiwan’s Copyright Act, we took a non-infringing position by adhering to strict not-for-profit principles.
- By disclaiming all property rights using the CC0 public domain declaration, we made sure the Ministry of Education could incorporate all our contributions at any time.
超過 30 人參與的萌典團隊在黑客松期間組成，並且連夜趕工。翌日，該團隊不但以 JSON 和 SQL 格式發表了完整的內容，而且還完成了適用於各大平台的網站和應用程式雛型。由於當時民間版實價登錄地圖關站事件記憶猶新，我們搶先透過兩個法律程序避開版權問題：
- 根據著作權法第 50 條，我們聲稱對政府生成的資料進行合理使用，並嚴格堅守非營利用途的原則，採取非侵權的立場。
- 透過 CC0 公眾領域貢獻宣告，我們放棄所有著作財產權，確保教育部可在任何時候納入我們的所有貢獻。
After months of deliberation, the Ministry eventually agreed to our fair use claim and collaborated with us to convert their CC-licensed Taiwanese Holo & Hakka dictionaries into a cross-referenced, multilingual platform at moedict.tw. The website would go on to serve millions of visits per month, with over 100 thousand regular mobile app users by the end of 2013.
經數月審議，教育部終於同意這項合理使用聲明，並與我們合作，把以創用 CC 授權釋出的臺灣閩南語常用詞辭典與客家語常用詞辭典整合進可交叉引用的萌典多語文應用平台。這個網站目前每月提供數百萬人次的服務，至 2013 年年底，也有超過 10 萬用戶將萌典應用程式安裝在自己的行動裝置上。
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