On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Delirium <delirium(a)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.