On Wed, 26 Nov 2003, Martin Harper wrote:
Hi all.
When a Wikipedian moves content from one article to another, this is covered under section 5: COMBINING DOCUMENTS. This requires that 'In the combination, you must combine any sections Entitled "History" in the various original documents, forming one section Entitled "History";'.
Clearly we don't do this. However, we might to be able to claim that we combine the history "by reference" if we state "from [[X]]". Dubious?
It depends on what is considered history. The GNU/FDL was written for works with clear revisions, following each other. One would not note every single small change in the history, but only when a new version is actually published (and not always even then). This would naturally sweep many minor edits under the rug - rather than noting every spelling correction in the history, one would only put down a new entry in the history if one had made so many changes that the document should really be considered a new version.
Maybe we could use a philosophy like that for Wikipedia too - Wikipedia pages are working documents. We freely put them out on the Internet under the GNU/FDL license in that state, but they are not 'versions' for the sake of the GNU/FDL. That way, Wikipedia itself needs not be bothered with the History section at all (unless we include other GNU/FDL material), and people who copy from us, can start a history file with "Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, <date>", add their own information, and also be done with it.
Andre Engels