Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
I would not feel comfortable with the idea that Microsoft or Yahoo could take our content, make an encyclopedia out of it (redistributable, of course), and *not* include an invariant section amounting to a link back to us.
Regardless of whether we mandate an invariant linkback section, they would have to attribute the source correctly, anyway. See 4.D. and 4.I. and, especially 4.J.:
[You may publish modified versions if you] Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations given in the Document for previous versions it was based on. These may be placed in the "History" section. You may omit a network location for a work that was published at least four years before the Document itself, or if the original publisher of the version it refers to gives permission.
I frankly don't get why we need an invariant section for linkback. IMO it would be enough to point at the GFDL, and recommend a linkback as a way that would satisfy us.