A couple more things:
* I am not in favor of switching to another license for three reasons:
** designing a license is not easy, and it would suck a lot of
energy out of Wikipedia proper. Furthermore, it is not clear
that in the end we would be able to agree on one license.
** GFDL has goodwill in the community; our new license would be
scrutinized and certainly criticized by vocal GNU hawks.
** I think it is not too difficult for Wikipedia to comply with
GFDL, see below.
* the requirement that (at least) the five most important authors be
listed can be easily fulfilled once we keep complete logs (which is
desirable for other reasons as well). We simply list *all*
contributing authors then, and that is in compliance with GFDL.
* The requirement that titles have to be changed for every new version
of the work can be waived by the authors; we need to have a clear
statement on the submit page which says: "you are now submitting
your additions under GFDL without front- and back cover text and
invariant sections; furthermore you agree that modified versions of
the document may retain the same title. If you don't agree, don't
hit submit."
* Three additional arguments against the current strict table
attribution requirement occured to me last night:
** if we really want large websites to adopt Wikipedia (Microsoft
is out since they have Encarta, but Yahoo, Google and AOL are
potential customers), there is absolutely no way that we can hope to
dictate layout decisions to them. Their site designers will laugh us
out the door.
** On educational websites that use some materials from Wikipedia,
teachers typically would want to tell students about the project, but
they don't want their students to jump right in and contribute
to Wikipedia: it would distract too much; learning is the focus.
So you make actually discourage teachers from using Wikipedia
material, because the current table would suggest to students
that the teacher wants them to contribute.
** We are currently using FOLDOC materials which were licensed to
us under GFDL. Imagine their invariant section contained some
pink table and a blinking icon. I don't think we would
appreciate it.
Cheers,
Axel