I have just been sent this. I wasn't subscribed to this particular list but am not. The reply below is a brief summary.
Hi Guys,
I have left a fairly full reply to this on the WMF blog awaiting approval from Jay and also it is discussed on the project pages on Wikipedia, over several years. There is a gap between the wording of licenses and urban myths circulating about what they say.
Broadly the GFDL demands that authors are "credited" but does not include anything on how you identify them (unlike the creative commons licenses). Either this means to comply with GFDL you need to carry a local copy of the edit history (which provides the only local way of identifying authors, albeit in a tedious fashion) including all
10,000 versions of the Global Warming article complete with every
piece of obscene vandalism etc.) or this means you have to credit authors providing a theoretically possible route to identify them (not just include them in a long list of possibles). Nothing in between this is any better than the second option since to find an author for a piece of text you still have to go to the page history on Wikipedia. The German DVD which carries an author list copy locally which may be better for egos (or not, since it does imply the authors are responsibly) but is not more compliant than us: to get the author who wrote xyz is still a long trip through WP page histories. There is no different in license terms between a link back and any other way given of directing the reader to the page histories in Wikipedia. GFDL does not mention "link" (see Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License)
Some of the CC licenses include carrying a local copy of an artists preferred name (we do this as we carry the image pages). GFDL does not.
We also incidentally do not carry references or sources and leave the individual to find these at Wikipedia in the same way.
Andrew
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 11:29 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Date: 2008/10/24 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9 BitTorrent link up To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org
2008/10/24 Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca:
David Gerard wrote:
Instructions: http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/charity-news/2008-wikipedia-for-schoo...
Torrent link: http://www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/schools-wikipedia-full-20081023.tar.g...
Size of .tar.gz is 3.1 GB.
Good idea but bad implementation - they're not compliant with the GFDL as far as I can tell. The articles have no author lists or backlinks to the edit histories on Wikipedia. Not sure if backlinks would actually be sufficient for a mirror intended for offline browsing, for that matter.
I've put them on the list over at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Abc#2008.2F9_Wikipedia_Selection_for_schools but I haven't the time or energy to do proper follow up this weekend, anyone else want to take a stab?
Someone mentioned that in a new thread as well. I agree, it doesn't look compliant. I never thought to check since it was being organised by a Wikipedia Admin... That admin reads this mailing list, so hopefully we'll get some comment soon.
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