Hmm. There is an issue which has been raised before by Duncan Harris
on the en list:
>" The way I see it the Document referred to
in the GFDL cannot be an individual Wikipedia article. It has to be the whole of
Wikipedia. If the Document were an individual article then Wikipedia would be in breach of
its own license. Every time people copy text between articles then they would create a
Modified Version under the GFDL. They mostly do not comply with GFDL section 4 under these
circumstances on a number of points. So the only sensible interpretations are the whole of
English Wikipedia or the whole of Wikipedia as the GFDL Document. This has the following
implications for GFDL compliance: - only need to give network location of Wikipedia, not
individual articles - only need to give five principal authors of Wikipedia, not of
individual articles - no real section Entitled "History", so no requirement to
copy that"
I think this is right: article history in practice fails the license
terms. I had a look at a couple of articles which was itself a labour
of love. In particular you find immediately drafting is not generally
done in an article, except first time around for new stubs. For
existing articles being reworked, a lot of content is generated/worked
out/negotiated on various different talk pages, often not the main
article talk page, before moving onto the actual article page using
copy and paste. There is also a fair amount of copy and paste when
sections are spun out to their own article or articles merged into a
main article. In none of these cases does the article history
correctly attribute authorship. Main author is even worse as content
gets deleted by vandalism and restored so often finding original main
contributors is practically impossible.
I think Wikipedia is so far from compliant in the interpretation of
the license if we take "one article as a document" that we have to
accept that the whole thing is the document in license terms and no
history is available.
BozMo
=========================================
On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/3/14 Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske(a)googlemail.com>om>:
IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of
"direct" URLs
(
en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later
time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like
we will use that space after all :-)
That may be one reason, but I think the main reason is to avoid
problems with articles called things like "index.php". /wiki/ is a
dummy directory, there's nothing actually there to conflict with, the
root directory has real files in it that need to accessible.
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