On Dec 4, 2007 3:29 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
It seems the two of you are barking up the same tree. Nowhere does Klaus say that the version history is invalid, quite on the contrary. He is saying that it _is_ the version history, and therefore that one is not allowed to copy Wikipedia material without republishing the history page as well.
He's also saying that the WMF is claiming otherwise. I've seen no such claim.
As the WMF provides databases that do not contain the relevant metadata, I would certainly say that the WMF's actions amount to a de facto claim that article content can be distributed without history listings. If that is not the WMF's intent, then they ought to at least make clearer to reusers that they will need more than just the articles dump and provide mirror sites with a way to obtain and use history information without loading every historical version of every article. (Not least because there are no complete and working history dumps of the largest wikis).
-Robert Rohde