I think the licence situation with the text in the MediaWiki namespace
needs to be clarified.
The messages were originally part of MediaWiki, so are presumably GPL.
However, people are editing them on Wikipedia, and other sites, under
the impression that all of their edits are GFDL.
Many of the changes are not creative enough to be copyrightable, but
for some messages significant changes have occurred. Compare, for
example,
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=MediaWiki:Noarticletext&oldi…
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Noarticletext
Is it possible for a notice to be added to the entire namespace that
edits should be made under the GPL? Or would it make more sense to
have edits be PD so the language.php files can be updated from the
MediaWiki namespace without needing to worry about the licence terms?
What should happen to the existing edits that have been made by people
unaware that their edits ought to be GPL? Is there a solution other
than reverting to the default text?
I have copied this message to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki_namespace#Licensing_issues
for those who prefer to reply on the wiki.
Angela.