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.