Dominic McDevitt-Parks wrote: While I would agree that a "local copy" is a good idea, it is not in a very strict sense necessary. All that is necessary is to have a copy that is accessable through the network you are using, somehow. Having a local copy means that it is accessable at the same time the rest of the site is up/down. As for the requirement to have the content link to the original source article, that is not necessary either. It may be a good idea, but it is not required by the GFDL, nor a legal requirement. All that is necessary is that you credit five authors of the text, presumably the five "leading contributors". It isn't clear exactly which five, or if random vandals on the history page qualify, or what edits done that are credited only to an IP address really mean, but only five are strictly needed. The metric for determining the five "leading contributors" is certainly a very grey area in terms of what the GFDL asks you for here. Edit count is hardly the best metric for many reasons. All of the other requirements are completely made up here and are not needed by the GFDL. If this is something the Wikipedia community wants to put into here, they ought to change the license that Wikipedia is licensed under. Good luck on trying to do that. That would mean restarting Wikipedia from scratch, essentially. I'm not suggesting that these are bad recommendations in terms of being nice to Wikipedia and helping to grow Wikimedia projects, but be very clear that this is what you are saying and not that these are legal requirements that are strictly necessary to copy the content, or even republish it in the form of another website. While "good advise" in terms of being nice, this is awful legal advise on the whole. -- Robert Scott Horning

geni wrote: This is a copy-and-paste from Wikipedia's own information pages on the matter. I won't claim to be the expert here. Perhaps you could fix them then, or maybe even *say* what the problem is? Dominic

OK Dominic, lt's g through it. Couple of points I must make first. 1. I do not ever use Wikipedia logos, trademarks, or other materials as these violate US Trademark laws. I don't care if Wikipedia says "Please link back to us with attribution", it is irrelevant. I have received no permission from the foundation to use its trademarks in such a way. Whether or not the Wikipedia community says this is ok and should be done for GFDL compliance, the FOUNDATION has given no such consent to anyone, and any sites doing it are subject to legal action from the Foundation. The Wikipedia Community has **NO** authority to release third party sites from claims and causes of action from the Foundation for trademark misuse, on the **FOUNDATION** has such authority. Before I post any attribution back to the Foundation (which would make the foundationliable for the content) I need the Foundation to grat permission for use of its trademarks in this manner. 2. http://en.wikigadugi.org/wiki/WikiGadugi:About points to the GFDL. This statement is apprently not accurate. 3. The date the articles were uploaded and the last author is already listed in kanohesdi (history) for each article, so this statement is inaccurate. I request persmission from the Foundation to use its trademarks solely for the purpose attribution as required by the GFDL. Email of such consent to this list is acceptable as a reply to this email. The foundation must release WMG and Wikigadugi from any and all liability, claims, and causes of action for the use of its trademarks and names SOLELY for the purpose of GFDL compliance. I ca find no page on the wikimedia.org site that grants such a release. I will not use or misuse Foundation trademarks without such permission. Jeff Dominic McDevitt-Parks wrote:

Robert Scott Horning wrote: It could potentially be trademark infrginement and trading on the goodwill of the foundation in certain situations. In any event, companies are not about civil disobediance. WMG needs permission or implied pemission in the form of a statement by he Foundation that use if its valuable trademark rights is granted for purposes of attribution through the use of its trademarks. Apolicy page on wikimedia.org would probably address any issues on this topic. Jeff

geni wrote: Unfortunately, I do. Jeff

geni wrote: Under the GFDL you give consent to relicense your changes. This means whomever is the last editor of an article is the "Author", not the whole chain of editors to that point since subsequent editors are simply relicening your content when they add their own edits. By editing and saving the article, the final editor is the author in this sense. The GFDL and Wikipedia's posted policies state that Wikipedia must be given attrbution to comply with the GFDL. Your website is then listed in the "Mirrors and Forks" as a BAD WEBSITE if you do not. Wikipedia cannot give consent to use "Wikipedia" since it does not own the trademark, the foundation does. Jeff

geni wrote: Then Wikipedia in its dumps must IDENTIFY AT LEAST FIVE AUTHORS AUTHORS since I have no crystal ball as to who wrote what. In this case, Wikimedia is violating the GFDL by failing to publish authors along with content. No progress I see here ... Jeff

geni wrote: ok then. I'll post an en: link back to wikipedia for each article by writing a program that will tag the xml for each article and create the en: link. What else is required to get wikigadugi of the BAD WEBSITES list. Jeff

geni wrote: ok. I will try to get this all dne this week. after I do this, please remove wikigadugi from the BAD WEBSITES list. Thanks Jeff

Jeffrey V. Merkey wrote: Note that what I said here was a bibliographic reference to Wikipedia. Where the trademark infringement comes from is something like the sorts of publications done by Wikipress (see http://www.wikipress.de/Hauptseite) These have the words "Wikipedia" spelled out boldly on the title page, implying some sort of strong connection to Wikipedia. These are IMHO uses of WMF trademarks that perhaps ought to be used with formal permission. If instead you have inside the "many thanks to" page of a published book a mention of Wikipedia and noting that the information came from there, I don't see where the problem comes here. Or better still if you list on a formal bibliographic reference list of where the content came from, having Wikipedia listed near the top of the list in perhaps even a featured position on the list as a major source of the information. That shouldn't be a problem. I hope the WMF doesn't take issue when WMF trademarks are used in this fashion. For a web site something either on a special "About" page or as a "fine print" at the bottom of the page noting that the content came from Wikipedia originally would IMHO be essentially the same thing. An infringing use would be to completely reproduce a Wikipedia page, completely with the "meatball" logo and be designed to look identical in all other ways to Wikipedia pages, making no distinction between Wikipedia and your copy. Unfortunately some people have done exactly this, even with very similar URLs that are very similar to Wikipedia, but with all kinds of advertisement all over all of the pages. What is interesting in the GFDL is that there is a "title clause" that actually *requires* the use of the title in the publication that is republished via permissions granted through the GFDL. How exactly this relates to Wikipedia is very vague, and statements by the WMF have muddied the waters even more in an attempt to try and protect the WMF trademarks. As I've noted, the name "Linux" is also trademarked in a fashion that presumably "Wikipedia" is also intended to be used. The one huge difference here, however, is that the WMF is trying to capitalize on the use of the term "Wikipedia" for fund raising activities, while Linus Torvald doesn't seem to care all that much, and is mainly holding the trademark to keep it from being claimed by some other 3rd party. I guarentee that many people are using the term "Linux" without even consulting or talking with Linus. From an ethical standpoint, it seems very responsible to note clearly where the original source of the material came from. And the only reasonable way you can do that is to use a WMF trademark such as "Wikipedia", even if the name appears only in the URL. The issue about seeking permission from the WMF in order to do bibliographic reference is that by requiring premission, it invalidates the GFDL. The content reverts to a strong propritary copyright, which simply can't be copied unless you have formal permission from all of the authors of that content. On the pratical side, it makes it impossible to reproduce the content at all. Presumably it could also get the WMF into problems as the content was given to the WMF (on their server farms) under the terms of the GFDL, so it couldn't even be displayed at all unless the WMF also has independent authorization (aside from the GFDL) to publish the content. -- Robert Scott Horning

Hoi, It seems to me that your have a formal problem that requires a formal response. Am I correct that you require the Wikimedia Foundation to express publicly that the Wikimedia Foundation accepts the use of Wikipedia TM to links back to the original Wikipedia content in order to comply with the requirements of the GPL? If this is what is required, it seems to me that the WMF needs to decide if it can make a blanket pronouncement allowing this specific use of the Wikipedia TM, Wiktionary TM WikiEtc TM. Thanks, GerardM Jeffrey V. Merkey schreef: