--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote:
Simon's questions were specifically about how it
is
that the license permits us to require the inclusion
of an HTML linkback in the invariant sections. In
my first response, I answered that question,
though of course more details may come out in the
course of further discussion.
However, here I want to explain why the attribution
requirement is important and a good thing.
[snip]
I think requiring some form of acknowledgement and a
linkback is a good thing. And even though I don't
think you can force someone to put a linkback on every
page under the FDL, I think that for them to do so is
a good idea. The thing I'm not so keen on is telling
people what format to put the linkback in -- a
particular HTML table.
I think making people do that might be fine if they
are running some site crawling with tables, like Yahoo
or Microsoft do. But if all I want to do is put some
articles on a website, that isn't crawling with
tables, why can't I simply but up something at the end
saying, e.g., "This page was originally based on an
article from Wikipedia
(
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Mathematics)"quot;.
That is basically what Wikipedia at present does with
other FDL or public domain sources. We stick in a
simple attribution line at the end, we don't throw in
some big table. Why should Wikipedia insist other
sites do what it doesn't? (Admittedly, these other
sites don't ask us to.)
[snip]
Simon J. Kissane
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