The other day I thought, well, as soon as I finished cleaning my data I should contact Werner again, I had been in touch with by-email and phone since 2005 when he gave me the permission to publish any of his data under GFDL license and part of it was also published on the Italian and the Low Saxon wiktionary. I stopped to upload data for various resons which I don't want to underline here, it would disturb the memory of this very particular person.

Werner built his "dictionaries" or better bilingual glossaries from texts, he just picked out the words and added them manually, line by line to html pages. They should have helped people to read and study foreign languages.

Some days ago then I noted: the pages were not there anymore and I tried to phone, but the phone number didn't exist anymore - it was really a bad sign. I had not downloaded all his pages, because he wanted to transfer them himself in one big file per language which of course would have avoided much work.

In the meantime I wrote the city and asked if they could tell me where he was. The answer was clear enough: they told me they could not give me any detailed information, I could just avoid loosing time searching. I believe that we all know well what this means: Werner Eichelberg is not there anymore. A person I have never seen, but who did so much for free cotents.

His Italian data, time ago, was included into the LEO dictionary, so the first thought was: at least they do with that bit of data what he always wanted: make it accessible for free to people.

I have been searching half a day on the web, trying to get at least some cached pages of his smallest dictionaries found part of Low Saxonn and Latin as well as some single pages here and there. Then there was that tought: what about the Way back machine of the Internet Archive? I had a look and found quite some data. Not complete, but, yes, something is there. In particular his biggest dictionary is lacking many, many pages: English-German.

He is going to get his own region in Ambaradan. The work he did, even if not perfect, shall be used like he told me in 2005, under GFDL-license (we never talked about other ones even if I am sure he would have agreed). It will take me quite a long time to prepare his data, but it's fine: it may not get lost. Should you who read have any part of his dictionary downloaded, please contact me. Eventually there is a part in there which the Internet Archive does not have. Let's try to get the puzzle together and have his virtual children, all those dictionaries he daily cared for, live.

Thank you Werner for doing all that work for people who never knew you, we will make sure they can go on using your data for study and also simply to understand some text.

*****

Btw. we have an Ambaradan fan page on Facebook where we also publish such articles.