On 6/30/05, Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
Your disagreement doesn't make a lot of sense to me. There is no "special right" inherent in saying "This article was originally written by members of the Wikipedia community", and it does not preclude anyone from forking. It is a historical statement that is much more practical than "This article was written by these 250 people:...", or much more wiki-like than "This article was originally started by Erik" (as CC-BY would require).
I strongly support the CC-WIKI license. It is the most practical solution to the attribution problem. If you're worried about forking being difficult, then you haven't read the GFDL very carefully, as it is probably the most forking-unfriendly license there is in the field of free content.
I am well aware of the terms of the GFDL. Just because I do not agree with you does not me I do not understand. If you'd like to discuss anything specifically, please be my guest... I may be able to clear up any misunderstanding you have related to it.
The important difference you've missed here is that CC-wiki grants special rights to the originating wiki. 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.
The content of Wikipedia is not the property of the Wikimedia Foundation. The content of Wikipedia is the creation and property of the contributors and thus the community and it was created for the benefit of the entire world. As such the right and control of our content must rest in the hands of the community, and creating special grants for the Foundation removes that control from the community.
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). These issues can be addressed in ways which do not create a new form of ownership for the originating wiki's site operators as the CC-wiki license does.