On 11/7/05, Alphax alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 11/6/05, Gerrit Holl gerrit@nl.linux.org wrote:
Habj wrote:
According to GFDL, one must always state what work under GFDL the
present
work is based on. Is this true also for translations between different wikipedias? I have heard both "yes" and "no" stated as an answer to
this.
If I take that literally, article revision N should always explicitly state that it's based on article revision (N-1), or does it?
Gerrit.
Well, the only sane way to apply the GFDL to Wikipedia is to treat the revisions as contributions toward a joint work, not to treat each
individual
edit as creating a new version under the GFDL. All of this is just speculation, though, there isn't really an explicit statement as to
exactly
how to apply the GFDL to Wikipedia. For translations the previous version should be stated in the section entitled history. The most straightforward way to do that would be to
add a
section entitled history to the article itself. One could argue that
this
requirement is met by simply adding a note in the edit summary, but this
is
a somewhat tenuous argument. You could also argue that there is an
implicit
license, or that any co-author in a joint work has certain rights beyond
the
GFDL, but these would be completely untested waters.
I believe that the revision history itself is considered part of the work (since it contains the authorship infomation); the annotations provided in the edit summaries, which may included statements such as "translated from (interwiki)(article)(revision)" are a significant part of this. Where talk pages exist, these too rightly form part of the article, especially where the history of a transwiki is contained in them.
Further discussions on this matter should probably go to juriwiki-l...
Alphax | /"\
If indeed the revision history itself is considered part of the work, and that is considered the section entitled "History", then that entire section must be copied into any derivative. That section must be included, in its entirety, in any print version. The database dumps must have the information (even just the current dumps). The static version of Wikipedia, if it is resurrected, would have to have the information. The contents of Special:Export arguably should even have the information.
Now you'd like to add talk pages, but only sometimes. These aren't even arguably sections entitled "History" in most cases. And it wouldn't be enough to just include talk pages, because the talk page doesn't always contain the information itself, it sometimes refers to another page. Not to mention that the requirements of the History section aren't met (no publisher, no title). And there are plenty of copy/paste moves on top of that. And you can't know the title information without looking at the move histories, so better include that too. And according to some people you've gotta include the user pages.
It doesn't seem like a reasonable interpretation to me. In fact, I think such an interpretation would completely subvert the intention of the GFDL, which is to make a work actually reusable. Again, I think the only sane way to apply the GFDL to Wikipedia is to treat the entire article (at the least) as a single work by multiple authors. That's the way the GFDL was intended to be applied. If two people work on a textbook, the GFDL doesn't require them to have a history section listing every single typo that was fixed by one or the other. No, they are joint authors of a single text. You only get into Modified Versions if someone comes along and forks the text.
Now look, you can argue that this isn't the case, but if you are doing so you're saying that Wikipedia is out of compliance with the law, because Wikipedia is clearly out of compliance with the GFDL (and not just with regard to the History section).
Isn't juriwiki a closed mailing list? I seem to remember trying to sign up there and getting auto-rejected.