On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@gmail.com wrote:
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.
One thing that i forgot to mention is that i often fix interwiki links in Wikipedias in other languages in cases of complicated interwiki conflicts which interwiki bots cannot resolve automatically. Such fixes must be made across all Wikipedias; if even one Wikipedia is left unmaintained, the interwiki bots cannot update the links in other Wikipedias. (Or worse, they may update them incorrectly.)
When i start fixing interwiki links in a group of related articles in different languages and see such a template on an article in one of the Wikipedias, what am i supposed to do? I AM NOT *FREE* TO EDIT IT - i may be infringing the copyright of the author of the original text. Of course i understand that fixing an interwiki link is a small and technical edit, but i do not have any warranty that the copyright holder's lawyers will not sue me for that after seeing my name in the history.
So i don't have a choice: i don't edit the article in that language, and i leave the links in other languages unmaintained, too, because there is no point in a partial resolve of an interwiki conflict.
Of course, that is just one of the implications of not enforcing the GFDL across all projects.