Among some Japanese wikipedians, there are some concerns about legality of
certain editing practices -
translating article, cut-and-pasting from one page to another (such as
archiving village pump talk, spining out a section of a long article to
create a new article), merging two articles into one, etc.
Your opinions, pointers to relevant discussions (past or ongoing), or a
pointer to a more appropriate place to ask this kind of help would be
greatly appreciated.
(By the way, Village Pump is called Bistro or Cafe in some other wikipedias
that I could read - for those who are not familiar with English wikipedia.)
These editing constitutes "modification" of a document according to GDFL,
and it has to fulfill certain requirements such as including the history
section of the original document into the new one (4-I).
To practice this literally would be to copy and paste the list of usernames&
IPs and time stamps of the whole Village Pump into a new page, perhaps after
the body text. That's somewhat inconvenient and impractical. Translating a
page from one language to another, in part or in whole, would require the
same.
(Well, of course, you may say worrying about this kind of potential
copyright violation is rather impractical)
But it seems that the text of GFDL allows us a work around. As long as we
copy in verbatim, we do not have to include the history section, it seems.
Not even link back to the original, if the copy is "transparent." So, if one
copies a whole text in verbatim from village pump to some other page,
without history section, that would be okay. Then, after copying in
verbatim, one can edit that copy, and save. That would not violate GFDL,
either.
In translating article, one can copy an original text in verbatim to another
wikipedia, and save first. Then edit the copy, translating or making other
changes. That would be GFDL compliant.
Also, as I understand, this is the way projects like Internet-Encyclopedia
is working.
In non-wikipedia case, one can first reproduce 101 transparent, verbatim
copies of a manual for a free-software. Those copies do not have the history
section, but that's okay. And then, one can take one of those history-less
copies, make modification, and release under GFDL. That would be okay as
well.
I think the purpose of 4-I is to ensure the attribution and traceability of
the older versions of the document. But it seems there is a work around for
those who wants to reduce those info. (I cannot come up with a vivid
illustration of this, but I hope I am making sense.)
regards,
Tomos
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