Toby Bartels wrote:
How long until all text on Wikipedia is completely rewritten? 5 years? 10?
That's a good question.
Everything that /I/ write on Wikipedia is automatically free with /no/ restrictions, because /everything/ that I write is free with no restrictions. To be sure, such lack of restrictions applies only insofar as what I've written is /new/ -- otherwise, the rest is still copyright as before, and that material is licensed only under the GFDL. But can it work to require people to dual license their submissions, so long as the Creative Commons licence specifically applies /only/ to the material that's new? (For any given submission, that may be nothing, or everything.) Does such an idea fit into copyright law at all?
Well, it's hard to say, but basically, I suspect that this approach isn't helpful.
Here's the problem. Imagine that each of the following snippets is GNU FDL.
'ADE' <---- original article 'AbDE' <-- revision, but under the terms of the GNU FDL, this *must* be released under GNU FDL. Perhaps the 'B' portion is *also* released under Attribution-ShareAlike.
After a sequence of further edits, including efforts by someone to remove all of the original 'ADE' text, we end up with:
'abcde', where all of the parts are now released under GNU FDL and Attribution-ShareAlike. But since each step along the way included some GNU FDL, it *still* has to be released under GNU FDL.
And ONLY if 'abcde' is really a competely new aggregation of parts can *any* of it be released under Attribution-ShareAlike.
For example, if I write "Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd President" and release this under the GNU FDL, and you come in and add "Thomas Jefferson was the 3rd President, and he had red hair." Well, your work is a derivative work, and you have *no right* to release it under Attribution-ShareAlike. I suppose you could release 'and he had red hair' under Attribution-ShareAlike, but ai yi yi, what a mess.
But really, there are no significant problems with GNU FDL. It's complicated, and it reads 'funny' in parts for our context. I wish it were simpler, like Attribution-ShareAlike, but it isn't, so there you go.
--Jimbo