Precisely, Ray. The question is, does a webhost like Geocities "publish" content, or just make it available through their infrastructure, while the user who authors the content is considered the publisher? The WMF position is that it is a webhost, and editors are publishers.
There is a difference between a webhost like Geocities and the WMF. Geocities just hosts webpages. The WMF hosts a complicated website. WMF is responsible for everything about Wikipedia that isn't actual content. The software, the skins, the interface (give or take the bits that can be changed in the Mediawiki: namespace). The author doesn't do anything more than submitting a manuscript (ie. the wikitext). WMF then takes that manuscript, parses it and integrates it with everything else (prints and binds the book, puts a fancy cover design on it, adds all the stuff that goes on the title page, etc) and makes it available to the public. I call that publishing.
By the way, why are we talking about lay, as opposed to legal definitions? Are we discussing human readability? AFAICT, the earlier discussion was centring on the GFDL, a legal document. The term "publisher" has a special meaning in law.
Because we're lay people, not lawyers. I certainly don't know enough about the law to know the precise legal definition of "publisher", and I doubt many people on this list do.