Gregory Maxwell:
As things currently are, the
Wikimedia Foundation has the same obligations under the GFDL as I
would have if I were to make a fork. So if I grabbed the databases,
setup media wiki, and fixed the graphics so that I wasn't walking on
any trademarks my position would be just as legal as the Wikimedia
Foundations position. That's pretty fair and friendly: if I do the
same things I'm all good.
With CC-wiki this wouldn't be the case at all. My fork would be a
second class citizen. Even if all the editors moved to edit on
Gregpedia, people would still need to credit
www.wikipedia.org for the
material.
Material written on Wikipedia would be credited to the Wikipedia
community. Material written on Gregpedia would be credited to the
Gregpedia community. This seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me and
does nothing to preclude you from running and operating your fork, it
simply notes the historical fact that your content was originally
created by a different community, rather than misrepresenting it as
originating with you.
You are correct that under the terms of the GFDL, I do not have to
mention Wikipedia with a single word. I can, in fact, import the author
histories into my Foopedia and create a new site that seems to have
written 610,000 articles out of nowhere. I can even pretend that all
these users have accounts on my site and import their user pages (if
they have added "originally from .." templates, I can remove those).
Many users will go to Foopedia and get the impression that I, as founder
and operator, have made this thing happen, and that thousands of people
have worked for/with me. They might even get the impression that all
these people are right-wingers because I have Republican party
advertising all over Foopedia.
Now, I would argue that this would be a gross misrepresentation of the
historical facts, and that, if you want any licensing at all, a fair and
reasonable license should acknowledge the community origins of the
content, rather than allowing implicit or explicit false attribution to
an entirely different community.
The content of Wikipedia is not the property of the
Wikimedia
Foundation.
Wikipedia, however, is not just a bunch of random people doing things
that they would be doing anyway if Wikipedia didn't exist. It is people
collaborating in a specific framework, working together as members of a
specific community under specific rules. CC-WIKI is not about granting
special rights to an organization, it is about acknowledging the
community identity over the identity of individual writers.
As long as the emphasis is on community, rather than on organization, I
think CC-WIKI is exactly the right approach.
I agree that GFDL conformant attribution is an issue
in some media
(although I disagree that it is an issue for electronic sources, if
you can mirror the ~2ish GB of text in cur, then you could also manage
the contributor names).
Many mirrors and forks are set up by people who are either not
knowledgeable about licensing, or who do not have the resources to
comply with the technical requirements (we do not make this easy for
them). It's fine if you argue that you feel individual authors deserve
attribution over the community as a whole -- that is a legitimate
position to hold, although I disagree with it. But if you claim that you
want to make forking and mirroring easier, then you are misrepresenting
your position, because it does the exact opposite. CC-WIKI makes forking
simpler and acknowledges the work of the community as a whole rather
than that of individual contributors.
Erik