Sent off-list by accident:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Date: 2008/10/24 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9 BitTorrent link up To: Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org
2008/10/24 Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org:
Hi Guys,
I have left a fairly full reply to this on the WMF blog awaiting approval from Jay and also it is discussed on the project pages on Wikipedia, over several years. There is a gap between the wording of licenses and urban myths circulating about what they say.
Broadly the GFDL demands that authors are "credited" but does not include anything on how you idenitify them (unlike the creative commons licenses). Either this means to comply with GFDL you need to carry a local copy of the edit history (which provides the only local way of identifying authors, albeit in a tedious fashion) including all
10,000 versions of the Global Warming article complete with every
piece of obscene vandalism etc.) or this means you have to credit authors providing a theoretically possible route to identify them. Nothing in between this is any better than the second option since to find an author for a piece of text you still have to go to the page history on Wikipedia. The German DVD which carries an author list copy locally which may be better for egos but is not more compliant than us: to get the author who wrote xyz is still a long trip through WP page histories. There is no different in license terms between a link back and any other way given of directing the reader to the page histories in Wikipedia. GFDL does not mention "link" (see Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License)
Some of the CC licenses include carrying a local copy of an artists preferred name (we do this as we carry the image pages).
Sure, it's been discussed constantly for the last 7 years and there has been no conclusion, so I would strongly advise erring on the side of caution. I see no reason to include each revision, the GFDL only talks about listing authors, not listing who wrote each bit. That means you just need the history page, not all the pages it links to. An obscure and non-explicit reference to a page that may well not be accessible to the reader, hidden away on a page I doubt more than 1% of users will read (or even be able to find if they wanted to know who wrote an article) is hardly in the spirit of the license, is it? All you need to do is include a list of names (and/or pseudonyms) with each article, that isn't hard.
If you want to encourage the use of free content, you need to do it properly. That you can convince yourself that you're just about complying with the license if you stand on your head and squint as you look at it is not enough.