Hi Tomos
I do think this kind of discussion do not belong to the english mailing list.
The issues you are raising are not only relevant to the english wikipedia. Articles could be copied from other languages than english to the japanese wikipedia, so that makes it at a minimum wikipedia-l issue, and since you are mentionning wiktionary, I guess it should go to foundation-l.
There are more and more discussions about copyrights. They spread over several mailing lists. It would be nice that they are all at the same place, especially as Tomos wisely remind us "when someone translate a gfdl article from one language to another language, history from original authors is usually lost - unless the translator thinks of mentionning the origin of the content. Even when the origin of the article is mentionned, it is tough for a user to go to the original article and consult the original list of contributors as defined at the moment of the translation. In short, most of the time, when trade of content is done, we do not respect the gfdl requirements."
Since translations happen quite often between all languages, I think any discussion of change of cp status or addition of new status or recommandation to have PD content rather than gfdl, should be project wide.
Note : I would like to know whether all wikimedia projects are under gfdl, or if some are not, or if it is planned that some will not be
Greetings
Message: 5 Date: Fri, 28 May 2004 10:36:04 +0000 From: "Tomos at Wikipedia" Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: w to properly use articles from an outside GFDL source? To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed
There is another solution to this problem in discussion at Japanese Wikipedia and Wiktionary. It is a bit easier than the migration to GNU Free Content License, though I would love to see it happen soon.
We may introduce another license - so-called "intra-site public domain license" or "intra-wikimedia public domain license." What the license says is something like this:
"by contributing to Wikipedia, you allow others to use your contributions within Wikipedia's projects as if they are in public domain."
Copying and pasting of GFDL texts are against GFDL in a small way. And it happens in many contexts. (Moving Village Pump discussions to appropriate talk pages, dividing an article into two pieces, using a boilerplate texts, using {{subst:}}, etc.)
It is a bigger concern in Japanese Wikipedia, partly because fair use usually have to include attribution according to the Japanese copyright law, and because we do not yet have solid evidence to think that substantial compliance in spirit is safe enough. In other words, if a troll says, "hey, you violated my copyright, because you copied and pasted my contribution into another page without following GFDL, and I am going to sue you," that's not something we can laugh at.
The introduction of the PD license is also a way to reduce interlingual troubles - the required level of compliance at Japanese Wikipedia is a bit more strict/ literal than that suggested at en:Wikipedia:Copyright. But some English Wikipedians may not know about it, and bring an image or translate an article to English Wikipedia from ja. without fulfilling the requirement. That, again, is a violation of GFDL, and therefore likely a copyright violation.
If we introduce the "intra-wikimedia public domain license," we don't have to worry about it.
If English Wikipedia can also introduce similar license, that would make things more convenient.
Also, just in case it matters, we would still promote the GFDL-compliant preservation of attribution, the purpose is just to reduce the risks from legal technicalities, not to trivialize the attribution altogether.
Regards,
Tomos
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