Can an individual organisation such as Wikimedia change their requirements, despite the license, to something more lenient as you are suggesting? Even if they did, could some external organisation/person have a problem with it? Could the Free Software Foundation claim that we're misusing the GFDL? If they did, could they demand we use a different license (I think not, but I'll ask anyway)? Well, I'm just speculating, but they're questions that should be considered.

2006/7/12, Oldak Quill <oldakquill(a)gmail.com>om>: No, technically we cannot. I don't think the FSF can make such a claim, but the individual authors of that Wikipedia page might well have a point if they claim it is violating their copyright. I sometimes wished I had a time machine so I could go to January 2001 and warn Jimbo about the problems of the GFDL, advising him to find or create another license for Wikipedia. -- Andre Engels, andreengels(a)gmail.com ICQ: 6260644 -- Skype: a_engels _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

Oldak Quill schrieb: To be of any use, all authors of an article would have to multi-license their work (I did;-) which is unlikely for most articles. Also, it seems impossible to get an additional license from anons. Jimbo said he's working with the FSF to make the GFDL compatible with CC in the next version, and I trust that he will get that done. After all, we're working towards the same goal; open source shouldn't have incompatible proprietary licenses just because we can ;-) Magnus _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

There's something I've never understood about our use of the GFDL. I assume it is not the case that we are stuck with whatever version of the GFDL was around in September 2001? There must be some kind of provision in the text of the GFDL to automatically update the license to the latest version, am I right? If this isn't the case then we're as far from GFDL 1.3 as we are from CC-by-sa.

Somewhere (I think it might be in the GFDL itself) is a clause that says that any future version of the license will be "in the spirit of" the original GFDL. -- Mark [[en:User:Carnildo]]

Hi All, I'll better explain the whole story... our situation is: 1) after getting some nice media exposure traffic started to rise (about 5 published articles since March, 27; 2 of them on national media) 2) people do register, but actually 90% of what we get is from anon users, from the grammar mistakes they usually make I'd say it's at least 4 main contributors working almost every day, but all efforts to contact them have proved unsuccesful this far Now, I get the impression that a number of papers could use us as a free source for some kind "Not everybody knows that..." section of their papers. This would: 1) get a permanent exposure to the wiki 2) increase wiki's authorithy as a public data source 3) get people in touch with the written form of their language. The main contribution waves came exactly when important media published pms text quoted from the wiki, so it seems to make sense to work on this. Most people are not familiar both with reading and writing the language and with the very concept of a wiki. By acquiring some stable presence in the paper media we could use the trend that is manifesting itself on spontaneous basis. It's not a problem to have a small copyright related text published in small chars, from our marketing POV we'd want the wiki URL published in bigger chars. Please bear in mind that given the current trend we'll have NO way to contact 90% of the authors. От: "Andre Engels" <andreengels(a)gmail.com> Newspapers will need a much shorter text, IMHO. We are going to stand somewhere in the "local chronicle" page, sometimes in the "Culture" section, we cannot really expect them to waste this much room. What about writing: "The original text is published at http://pms.wikipedia.org/wiki/article and released under a GNU Free Documentation License. Details can be obtained at http://pms.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia/GNUFDL " At this point we would use a template to point readers of the original article to a machine readable copy inside the wiki, in a special namespace (say Printed_Articles:), where one could know who published what and were. If it seems to make sense to the people here I'll try my luck in asking the board to issue an official authorisation for this use. Thanks Bèrto PS I suggest to all minor language edition to try this marketing trick. And the smaller and more local the paper mentioning you, the more contributors you seem to get. Just make sure that text gets published in the same language as the original. ----- Исходное сообщение ----- От: "Sabine Cretella" <sabine_cretella(a)yahoo.it> Кому: <wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org> Отправлено: 12 июля 2006 г. 14:45 Тема: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Marketing: a question the the better _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

----- Исходное сообщение ----- От: "Oldak Quill" <oldakquill(a)gmail.com> Кому: <wikipedia-l(a)wikimedia.org> Отправлено: 12 июля 2006 г. 19:01 Тема: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Marketing: a question This is strictly related to the kind of content you allow in the wiki. Actually I never knew myself that Cristoforo Colombo was a native PMS speaker and that there is even a museum dedicated to him and opened by one of his descendants in the village in where he was born. I learned that by verifying the content we get, andf I hardly can imagine this sort of notions having a bad impact on the wiki as such. Obviously, some care must be taken from the very start. But on the other hand, having such data about small cities and villages published on the papers will give the people : 1) a clear idea of the kind of data the wiki community rates as interesting 2) the image of a wiki as a way to "store and share knowledge" 3) a first crucial contact with written minor languages as means of communication 4) the idea that they all hold knowledge that can be shared Point 4) is crucial for our project "Native atlas". We can manage to properly collect a full atlas of toponims in native languages ONLY if we can involve local people. Many of them will limit their contribution to adding data on their own close geographic area, but a percentage of these people will also add data on local traditions, life styles, etc. These data alone have an immense value for researchers who cross-reference toponims to infer old extinct languages like PIE, ligurian and lepontian. I'd rate this quite far from being "frivelous". In addition, we would present the material toghether with a call for partecipation in the "Native Atlas" project, and present the project itself for what it is: a giant scale data collection that researchers will eventually use. The last thing we need is people coming in to add a page about their own dog's birthday, obviously. Because it would only add extra admin work in getting rid of it. But this far I do not see any such trend, although it will definitely happen, if traffic grows enough for that. But at that point we'll also have a bigger admin structure and we'll be able to cope with the flow. I do not think that this marketing channel "as such" can send a peculiar image of the wiki. As all channels, it really depends on what you use it for. Bèrto _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

You mention trying to get permanently featured as "not everyone knows that" sections on the fun pages of newspapers. Could this not fuel a perception of Wikipedia as somewhat frivelous?

Couldn't it encourage more people to see our contents as a random collation of facts rather than a great source of information?

You mention trying to get permanently featured as "not everyone knows that" sections on the fun pages of newspapers. Could this not fuel a perception of Wikipedia as somewhat frivelous?

Being a small wiki, with few contributors and little articles, wiki licensing could be switched to a dual license like GFDL-Cc-by-sa. Cc-by-sa is very similar to the GFDL terms, but license text is not required. You would need to contact with all contributors to get their agreement to publish their previous work under cc-by-sa too. Changing the licensing informationg would make the future ones. And a strong community consensus required :) Be aware that contributions previous to the switching will be GFDL-only so you couldn't publich it under the second one. This may not apply to

information (e.g. like those ips usually give). Unrelicensable texts could either: -Be deleted (the strict way) -Tag them with a template saying 'some parts of this may not be available under CC ' (the easier way)

What about translations from other wikipedias? That text is highly likely

the GFDL-only, and I suppose it should also be redistributed as GFDL (i.e. printing the whole text of the licence)