I just realized that two replies I sent 12/24 on this topic just went to Philip, and not to the list. Figured I might as well resend them:
1
Philip Sandifer wrote:
Yep. Sucks, doesn't it? Unfortunately, if it's a consequence you're unwilling to accept in any circumstances, you should probably think twice about releasing your contributions under the GFDL.
That's not really much of a point: all the GFDL does is say that as long as the downstream users of the information comply with the GFDL, they won't be violating copyright. Even if my contributions were 100% public domain, editing them in such a way to say something about me that was untrue and damaging to my reputation would still be libel, and still be illegal.
GFDL does not make libel legal. It just makes the libelous edit not a violation of copyright. So GFDL is irrelevant to this issue.
What -is- an issue is which portions of the database are made available for download for sites wanting a copy of Wikipedia's article base to start from. And the User space and pages containing user discussion are of little use to Non-Wikipedia sites, while being potentially problematic for Wikipedia users.
-- Jake Nelson
2
Philip Sandifer wrote:
Except that the GFDL mandates that we distribute transparent copies of everything - if we did not distribute transparent copies of the userpages, we would violate the GFDL.
The GFDL only requires you either distribute, or provide a network address location for, Transparent copies if you distribute more than 100 Opaque copies. So besides legal quibbling about how many "copies" of Wikipedia we're distributing, there's the matter of whether or not Wikipedia user pages on the site are Opaque...
The GFDL says that standards-conforming HTML and XML with a publicly available DTD are considered Transparent. So it could legitimately be said that the Wikipedia User pages, /on the website/, not in a DB dump, are available in a transparent format.
Besides, I never said that we had to make it impossible to download the user space, just that it needn't be in the default dump for downstream users/content mirrors. If it's argued that the user pages as they are on the site aren't Transparent (which they are), providing a link to where the full dump can be had would keep us in compliance with the GFDL.
-- Jake Nelson