I wrote to Ken McVay of the NIzkor project for permission to use the Nizkor project's copyrighted materials under the GFDL. Here is my original message, and his reply.
Neil
--- My original message ---
Dear Mr. McVay,
The Wikipedia, an open content collaborative encyclopedia, has an article on Holocaust revisionism.
The encyclopedia is being written by volunteers, and has an open-access policy where any member of the public may edit articles. Hence articles "evolve" by multiple edits and contributions. As the Wikipedia is growing into one of the largest open-content resources on the Internet, it is unsuprising that Holocaust-related articles are, as you might expect, one of the major points of contention.
The Wikipedia policy in controversial matters is to use the "Neutral point of view" which fairly reports the opinions held by all sides of the argument, as well as any facts that are not in dispute. This is similar to your approach in Nizkor, which takes pains to fairly represent the arguments of Holocaust deniers, whilst refuting their arguments point by point.
At the moment the Wikipedia article lacks a thorough point-by-point debunking of the Holocaust revisionists' arguments.
I would like to be able to use material from your Holocaust FAQ in the article. Unfortunately, I cannot use verbatim content from the Holocaust FAQ as it covered by copyright, and all content in the Wikipedia needs to be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. This does not require the original author to give up their copyright, but instead only grants the right to others to distribute and use the material and to create derivative works covered by the same license.
If you were to grant permission for the Holocaust FAQ or other Nizkor material to be included in the Wikipedia under the GFDL, this would be very useful.
Alternatively, you may want to make your own contributions under the GFDL.
You can see the (evolving) Holocaust revisionism article for yourself at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_revisionism
There is also a Wikipedia mailing list which is used to discuss the organization of the encyclopedia. (see
http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
for details)
I invite you, and other Nizkor participants, to contribute to the Wikipedia.
Yours sincerely,
Neil Harris
-------- Ken McVay's reply -------- Subject: Re: Wikipedia article: "Holocaust revisionism" Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 16:27:25 -0500 (EST) From: Kenneth McVay, OBC kmcvay@vex.net Reply-To: kmcvay@nizkor.org To: Neil Harris usenet@tonal.clara.co.uk
You wrote:
Feel free to use any Nizkor FAQs or Nizkor Features you wish - i.e. those that originated from our staff. That includes the FAQs, Techniques of Denial, and the 66 QAR sections.
Ken