Good points here. The way I see it the Document referred to in the GFDL cannot be an individual Wikipedia article. It has to be the whole of Wikipedia. If the Document were an individual article then Wikipedia would be in breach of its own license. Every time people copy text between articles then they would create a Modified Version under the GFDL. They mostly do not comply with GFDL section 4 under these circumstances on a number of points.
So the only sensible interpretations are the whole of English Wikipedia or the whole of Wikipedia as the GFDL Document. This has the following implications for GFDL compliance:
- only need to give network location of Wikipedia, not individual articles - only need to give five principal authors of Wikipedia, not of individual articles - no real section Entitled "History", so no requirement to copy that
This makes a lot of sense to me as:
- I don't believe adding five principal authors of individual articles adds a lot of value. In any case this would lead to a lot of disputes and maybe gaming of the system if ever a system of defining principal authors was introduced. - the network location of articles is problematic in the general case of renames - the network location of articles (and thus edit histories and authors) is generally easily found from the article title and the Wikipedia URL - the spirit of GFDL history doesn't seem likely to me to intend every single minor edit - often copies (like Schools Wikipedia) would not want to include vandalism edit histories
Duncan
On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 2:34 AM, Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.comwrote:
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
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