On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
The FAQ seems to say we explicitly will not be doing any of this license tracking: "It will be the obligation of re-users to validate whether an article includes CC-BY-SA-only changes -- dual licensing should not be a burden on editors. This is also not intended to be bidirectional, i.e., merging in GFDL-only text will not be possible."
In practice, that means that everything will probably need to be treated as SA-only, unless a reuser wants to validate for themselves that they can legitimately use it under the GFDL. I personally see that as a feature, but your mileage may vary. =] In particular, having significant amounts of content dual-licensed makes it exceedingly easy for reusers to poison-pill their derived works so we can't re-merge their changes back into Wikipedia, by choosing only the GFDL for their derived works. Of course, that in itself would be no reason to reject the agreement, because the current situation is just as bad: the single-licensed GFDL is inherently designed to permit poison pills via the addition of invariant sections.
As far as I am able to understand, it wouldn't be so. Any SA-only contribution has to be marked because of SA terms. So, in the case of importing article from the Encyclopedia of Earth, there will be a note "This article is imported from the Encyclopedia of Earth under the terms of CC-BY-SA xx.xx". Also, I am sure that lists of sources at the projects will have information about the terms of usage. So, every page will be visibly marked as CC-BY-SA-only or it will be GFDL/CC-BY-SA if not marked with a particular attribution tag.
However, it is true that in the future there will be a lot of CC-BY-SA-only articles and that re-users will have to analyze which parts of the article are CC-BY-SA-only if they are willing to incorporate it at GFDL-only document.