Re: [Foundation-l] deviation from the GFDL in smaller projects

Recently i have been lurking around many smaller WMF projects. (When i say "smaller", i refer to Wikipedias which are smaller then the biggest ones - yes, that means almost all Wikipedias - and to non-Wikipedia projects in languages which have an established Wikipedia, as they are usually smaller than the Wikipedia in the same language.) One worrying thing that i noticed is that in some of these projects there is no strict adherence to GFDL-only text. Since my first day in Wikipedia i understood how important the GFDL is. I understood that articles cannot be copied verbatim even from sources whose copyright terms allow copying for non-commercial usage, because the "free" in "The Free Encyclopedia" does not refer only to price. There is, however, a de-facto consensus in most projects that non-text media (images, sounds) can be uploaded as fair use (es.wiki is a notable exception). PLEASE READ FURTHER: THIS EMAIL IS NOT A PROTEST AGAINST FAIR USE IMAGES. What i started noticing recently is that certain projects allow TEXT which is GFDL-incompatible. For example, a certain Wikipedia admits to taking certain texts from copyrighted sources which allow verbatim copying if the source is cited, but not free modification. Their rationale is that their language is under-privileged and has few proficient volunteer writers. Another Wikipedia has a template on thousands of articles saying that they were copied from a copyrighted online encyclopedia and asks the editors not to enhance them. (I have to admit that i have limited understanding of this language, but i'm pretty sure that i got this one correctly.) Unlike in the first example, this is a very well established literary language with millions of educated writers. A Wikisource in another language accepts texts which are outright copyrighted "by a special arrangement with the publisher, which allowed their free (as in beer) publication in Wikisource".