2006/7/12, Berto albertoserra@ukr.net:
can a newspaper publish an article from a wiki, provided that they quote the source page? I am thinking to propose this to a number of small local newspapers, but I am not clear on the copyright matter, since these newspapers are actually sold. Obviously, it would be just an article, the paper is 99,5% made of their own stuff. It would do great to get a better media exposure.
I assume that by 'a wiki' you mean 'Wikipedia' here? Being sold is no problem. The GFDL explicitly allows commercial reuse. The real problem is that the GFDL requires publication of the complete text of the license, the 5 major authors and the publication history of the work. Of these, the last would be the smallest problem, provided we don't consider each version of a Wikipedia page as a separate edition, in which case "This article is based on such-and-such Wikipedia article, version <date>" could be considered enough. The second is problematic because Wikipedia itself does not keep to the GFDL here - there is no author list except for the page history. The first has the problem that the license could easily be as large or larger than the article itself. Online one can just have it on a different webpage and link to that, in printed material it's not that easy.
Having said that, Wikimedia policy is for online publication to be considered adhering to the GFDL when they mention the GFDL and link to it, and the same with the original Wikipedia page. I think it would be sensible to have similar requirements for print media, perhaps with a short description of what the GFDL means added because people cannot just click a link in a print newspaper. Thus, I would like to allow this provided the newspaper adds something like:
This article is an adaptation from the Wikipedia article "Nonsense", which can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense. It falls under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it can be copied and distributed by anyone in modified in modified or unmodified form as long as the new publication is under the same license. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html for the text of the license. A copy of this article can be found on our website at http://www.somenewspaper.com/article/08-11/fromwikipedia.htm.
That last line is because I suddenly remembered another requirement of the GFDL: One has to have a machine-readable version of the article available for any and all who request it.
However, I am not speaking here in any kind of official capacity here. Until the Wikimedia Foundation approves it my statements have no value whatsoever. And even if the Wikimedia Foundation approves it, technically all the editors of the article should approve too, although an approval of the Free Software Foundation instead would clear up a lot of sky as well.