I had a question about complying with the GFDL in medium-print-run,
subset-of-Wikipedia distribution efforts.
Say someone wanted to distribute a few Wikipedia articles in connection
with some event---the one that came to mind would be distributing some
information about Greek culture together with a local Greek festival,
but there are plenty of other possibilities.
Now, the GFDL requires that if you distribute more than 100 copies of a
document, you must also distribute the source (i.e. wikitext) version of
the document, and the text of the GFDL itself. I don't see a good way
to do this on a smallish pamphlet (say, 5 pages): the text of the GFDL
itself would nearly double the size of the pamphlet. The wikitext
version is permitted to be distributed electronically (i.e. "see
http://blah/ for a source version of this document"), but even that is
somewhat onerous, as a small organization may not have the resources or
interest in maintaining a mirror of the documents it distributes for the
required year. Notably, pointing to
wikipedia.org is not
sufficient---the GFDL requires that the person doing the distribution
maintain an exact source mirror of the document exactly as distributed,
"free of added material", and including any changes, so "derived from
the Wikipedia article [here]" would not be enough.
In googling to see how people handled this, I came across Wikitravel,
which has a lengthy rant on somewhat similar issues, and they concluded
that the GFDL is simply impractical for pamphlet-type distribution
[
http://www.wikitravel.org/en/article/Wikitravel:Why_Wikitravel_isn't_GF…]FDL].
Hopefully there are more creative solutions though, as it would be a
shame to be unable to use Wikipedia material in pamphlets for logistical
reasons.
So really to summarize, my questions are:
--- Do I really have to print the full text of the GFDL? It's not a
very short document relative to a small pamphlet.
--- Do I really have to make available the exact source of my pamphlet?
Thanks for any suggestions,
Mark