[Foundation-l] deviation from the GFDL in smaller projects

[John Vandenberg]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
> <amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Another Wikipedia has a template on thousands of articles saying that
>> they were copied from a copyrighted online encyclopedia and asks the
>> editors not to enhance them. (I have to admit that i have limited
>> understanding of this language, but i'm pretty sure that i got this
>> one correctly.) Unlike in the first example, this is a very well
>> established literary language with millions of educated writers.
>
> One thing that i forgot to mention is that i often fix interwiki links
> in Wikipedias in other languages in cases of complicated interwiki
> conflicts which interwiki bots cannot resolve automatically. Such
> fixes must be made across all Wikipedias; if even one Wikipedia is
> left unmaintained, the interwiki bots cannot update the links in other
> Wikipedias. (Or worse, they may update them incorrectly.)
>
> When i start fixing interwiki links in a group of related articles in
> different languages and see such a template on an article in one of
> the Wikipedias, what am i supposed to do? I AM NOT *FREE* TO EDIT IT -
> i may be infringing the copyright of the author of the original text.
> Of course i understand that fixing an interwiki link is a small and
> technical edit, but i do not have any warranty that the copyright
> holder's lawyers will not sue me for that after seeing my name in the
> history.

You are not infringing the copyright by your edit.  The person who
clicked save asserted that it was their own text, and released it
under the GFDL - they are responsible!  If you notice, you should tag
it as a copyright violation, but it is not your duty to check.

--
John Vandenberg