On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:38 PM, Mike Godwin mgodwin@wikimedia.org wrote:
That said, the GFDL requires authors to be listed in "the section entitled History", and it clearly states that a "section "Entitled XYZ" means a named subunit of the Document..."
So is current Wikipedia practice consistent with the GFDL or not?
I believe that Wikipedia practice is not consistent with the GFDL. That's why I notified you that the WMF's right to use my content under the GFDL has been permanently revoked.
Obviously, the History page reachable from a Wikipedia article could be interpreted as not being a "section" or a "named subunit."
On the other hand, the history page *could* be interpreted as being part of the Document.
Historically, the community has generally interpreted this attribution
requirement of the GFDL as allowing for a link to a History page. In this respect, there is no essential difference between GFDL and CC-BY- SA 3.x.
For online copies, as I've said before, I don't see much problem with this. As I've said before, it's hard to draw the line as to what is part of the work and what is not part of the work, when it comes to online sources. But I don't think the same argument can be made for offline copies.
If there is no essential difference, then your concern about getting
credit is a wash, regardless of whether the license on Wikipedia is updated.
My main concern is that CC-BY-SA will be deliberately misinterpreted to not require direct attribution - and the published draft of the RfC confirms that this concern is valid.
This doesn't mean your concern is any less valid or invalid -- it just
means that there's nothing inherent in the question of updating the license that should trigger it.
The GFDL is much more clear on this issue. And some comments Erik has pointed us to from the CC lawyers make it clear that CC intends for CC-BY-SA to allow attribution by URL, so even if CC-BY-SA 3.0 isn't interpreted by the courts to allow this, CC-BY-SA 4.0 very well might.