Thomas,
I have read your note twice. I have reread the GNU licence three times. I have read the Wikipedia copyright statements (again).
It is still completely unclear to me if Wikipedia counts as a publisher (which is looks like it is but it says it isn't). Still though I really don't think the "Is Wikipedia a single GFDL work or a collection of GFDL works?" is relevant since as far as I can possibly see the current set up already complies in good faith with all the licenses, at least for as long as Wikipedia itself exists online.
Your argument about "reasonable definition" I don't buy. 95% of authors only give pseudo-names, which are often real name of other people whom they are not. The identification of most of the authors requires their user page as well, or to refer to "the user who used the pseudonym of John Smith on Wikipedia" in which case the references are back to Wikipedia and we might as well send everything there. It is a reasonable definition these days to tell people where they can find the information they require online. Countless instruction manuals and safety notices do this now. We say there are authors who deserve credit and where to find them. I think thats better than pretending a list of names and IPs means much to anyone.
For transparency ref comments on "censoring" we could give the URL to the exact version number of the article we used, as an article history.
Beyond this I don't think further effort increases the compliance. But I repeat my comment I am serious about wanting feelgood for contributers. Perhaps there is a way of doing this sensibly.
Andrew
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:56 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/24 Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org:
This is the third time these questions have turned around just on this project. We ARE erring on the side of caution which is why we have all the image pages (unlike others...).
I wouldn't mind doing more but I would question the value of useless gestures. For example if you say who wrote what is irrelevant I can get a list of the 60,000 editors including IP addresses who have edited any of these articles and add it as plain text at the foot of the license page (similar to the German DVD model) but does that really help?
It would be far better (and no harder) to include a separate list for each article. That way you avoid worrying about the "Is Wikipedia a single GFDL work or a collection of GFDL works?" debate.
The legalities of the GFDL are so confusing and ambiguous that they are best ignored for the most part. Just try and follow the spirit of the license, which includes that attribution is required. Telling somebody how to find the list of authors in a place they can't access is not attribution by any reasonable definition.
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l