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&oldid... 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.