On 11/21/05, Heiko Evermann heiko.evermann@gmx.de wrote:
Hi Anthony,
The most important point of non-compliance on the site itself is the lack of a title page listing five principal authors and the name of the publisher.
Once an article has a history of e.g. 30 entries, it is no longer feasable to identify the 5 principal authors. What makes things even more complicated: once you move a certain paragraph into a new article, you would have to find the 5 principal authors of this passage. If you insist on being compliant here, you can as well prohibit any moval of any content from one article to another. Is that what you want?
Well, the GFDL doesn't require that you identify *the* 5 principal authors. It requires that you identify 5 principal authors. But you don't have any argument from me that this would be a PITA to do. I'm not insisting on GFDL compliance, I'm just pointing out that Wikipedia isn't compliant.
I'm not sure why this GFDL requirement prohibits any "moval of any content". It's not that hard to put 5 names next to the title. "Article Blah, by A, B, C, D, E, and others" (with others linking to the full list of authors). Whether content is moved or not doesn't affect that.
Alternatively, an effort could be made to abandon the GFDL altogether. In the long term that's probably a better solution. The GFDL wasn't made for wikis.
A proposal by Magnus was interesting:
While I agree with this, a simple technical solution could be a "copy" function, similar to "move". Instead of splitting an article, just duplicate it by clicking on "copy" to a new name (and preserving editing history), then delete everything not intended for the split-off article.
But unfortunately this does not help at all if the target article already exists and you just want to move a passage from one article to another just because it fits there better.
Demanding to mention the 5 principal authors is also impossible, once you try to translate an article from en to any other language.
- There is no way to find out this information from the history of e.g.
[[creationism]] or [[Jehovah's witnesses]]
- There is no way to cramp this information (just in case you managed to get
it after all) into the checkin comment.
- You cannot put it into the discussion page, because old discussions might
get deleted.
So what is your proposal? You are the one who interprets things in this strict way. Please make a viable proposal. Otherwise one would have to put Wikipedia on hold. There have been lots and lots of edits and translations that violate the GFDL (if your interpretation is correct). Lots of pages are in violation and would have to be taken down because of copyright infringement. And you cannot even know which ones. The only way out then would be to find a more suitable licence and to start all over with an empty wiki. But this would be a huge waste of resources.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann
You don't seem to have read many of my posts. While I think it's clear that Wikipedia is not GFDL compliant, I never claimed that was a copyright infringement. Like I said before (look up a few posts), I think you'd have a tough time convincing a judge that an ISP was infringing copyright by distributing text that you gave it to distribute.
Anyway, I've already given an example of how one can become compliant with the requirement to list 5 principal authors on the title page (which is defined in the GFDL as the area around the title). It wouldn't be that hard to do, and there isn't really even an attempt at compliance with this requirement. That's why I called that point the most important one.
Anthony