[Foundation-l] Schools Wikipedia & GFDL - no direct credit to authors?

[Erik Moeller]

To clarify: the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools, including
schools-wikipedia.org, is a project of SOS Children UK. We've given
them trademark permission to use the Wikipedia name and logo on
relatively short notice as it would have been difficult for them to
change the branding of the project shortly before its release, and
they had a prior agreement from which they made the good faith
assumption that we would extend it.

But, in general, we're tightening licensing rules on the trademark and
the puzzle globe, and we've already made clear that the strong
Wikipedia branding right now (including the schools-wikipedia.org
domain name) is uncomfortably potentially confusing. It's an
interesting tension in the free culture movement between giving
content away & controlling the use of name & identity - cf. Mozilla's
conflict with the Debian project about the Firefox trademark. We're
developing a secondary mark that will be more easily usable.

It's not been developed with WMF staff resources, but some Wikipedia
volunteers have helped along the way. Andrew Cates, who coordinated
the project, commented on the Wikimedia blog regarding the
licensing/attribution issue:

http://blog.wikimedia.org/2008/10/22/sos-childrens-villages-presents-wikipedia-for-schools/#comments

Currently articles on the website say:
"This Wikipedia DVD Selection is sponsored by SOS Children , and
consists of a hand selection from the English Wikipedia articles with
only minor deletions (see www.wikipedia.org for details of authors and
sources)."

I think a direct link to the relevant history on each article page
would be preferable, but this to me is also an example of why we need
clear, simple & easy to follow attribution systems.
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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