On 6/7/07, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
Right. We should remember this only applies to modifited versions of the Document. If Wikipedia wanted to make the claim that it's not transferring between separately licensed individual documents when text goes from one page to the next, I have trouble seeing how that can be argued with.
Then again it's preferable for a host of reasons to act as if each page is a separate Document and we make sure to comply as much as possible with the conditions covering Modified Versions.
Yes. Personally I think the only sane way to interpret things is that everyone contributing to a Wikipedia article is a joint author as part of a single version which is *then* released under the GFDL. Whether or not the document is a single article or all articles then becomes for the most part a moot point (*), as the GFDL provides for both splitting up a single document and for combining multiple documents.
Any other way of interpreting things runs into problems. What is the Document? What is the Title Page? Where is the section entitled History? Where is the copyright notice? You can answer these questions individually, but I can't come up with a consistent way to answer all of them, and I've really really tried.
You can see my current method of trying to make a fork compliant with the GFDL at http://en.mcfly.org/McFly_copyrights
(*) Of course, if you treat each article as a Document, then forks would have to hand waive around the requirement to change the title.