delirium-
In fact, it's pretty evident that this clause of the GFDL was purposely written to disallow such things: it was written with software manuals in mind,
Exactly. That's why it is legitimate in terms of interpretation to use concepts from the Internet world that are not applicable in the paper world, such as hyperlinking.
Now whether Wikipedia would like to use the FDL is another matter. But we currently do, and changing our license seems pretty impossible at this point.
As I explained, it would be trivial to amend our "site contract" to provide for a release from this particular requirement of the FDL, which is optional. While this wouldn't fix past edits, it is unlikely that this problem is going to come up often, and when it does, who will remember that the submit message didn't *always* say this? (OK, we'll have to purge this message from the archives ;-)
Regards,
Erik