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