For example, by a literal interpretation, if we
consider the version
history the "history section" that's referenced in the GFDL, any
derivative would not only have to include author names, but
everything
that's currently recorded in the history section for each article,
which in some cases can be much more information than the article
itself. See the actual text of the GFDL:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
[begin quote]
# I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and
add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If
there
is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating
the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as
stated in the previous sentence.
[end quote]
Attribution for articles with thousands of associated usernames is not
trivial and potentially very burdensome. This is equally an issue for
electronic versions as for print, as the size of the actual
educational content that organizations like SOS children want to
include already far exceeds the media on which they are able to
transport it. Storing the entire version history of the article on
[[France]] means transporting the full meta-information about 9317
changes.
What happens if they haven't modified the document at all? Do they still have to
create the History section if it didn't exist before? How many display-level changes
constitute a modification to the document? Is putting a new template on Mediawiki a
modification to the underlying documents? Is it unlawful to make up a template that
doesn't have links back? What does this mean for plaintext print templates? Does
someone have to print out 2000 pages of history along with the actual text in order to
lawfully have a copy of the Wikipedia [[France]] article? What does this mean about the
eventuality of any paper based reproduction of wikipedia.... GFDL doesn't seem to fit
with the knowledge wiki model IMO as it is inflexible and based on arcane production
cycles. Is it unlawful for someone not to put an edit comment on when they edit a
wikipedia article for instance, as they are not fulfilling their GFDL obligations with
describing their new version?
Cheers,
Peter