Hoi,
The most important reason why the Wikipedia is GFDL is because it was
the best that was on offer at the time. When you want to narrowly
interpret what the GFDL says, you can. However this is not helpfull
and the only consequence is that people will scorn this attitude and
maybe even material that is published under this license.
The license and the way it is interpreted has been discussed and
explained to the people that are involved with the license. The GPL is
first going to be amended and then it will be the GFDL that will be
modernised. The reason why is simple; the GFDL was not created with
projects like Wikipedia in mind, it was intended for documentation
associated with GPL software.
Have a merry Christmas and be happy with what we have been given.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 12/25/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 12/25/05, Magnus Manske
<magnus.manske(a)web.de> wrote:
For practical purposes, we should consider
offereing a dump that contains
* articles
* templates (which are needed for many articles)
* a list of all author names
That would contain everything needed to generate GFDL-compliant,
complete articles, but still be much smaller than the full dumps.
We could put this information in the "articles" dump (slightly larger
download for everyone) or create a new dump type (more memory and
processor power needed to create and offer it).
That is likely not enough, because you couldn't discover the principal
authors that way... a great many republication worthy articles are
almost entirely written by one or two people. But more importantly, a
mere list of names would not appear to be enough to satisify the
GFDL's requirement to 'Preserve the section Entitled "History"'.
It would be preferable to only include templates which are used in the
main namespace, although that would further complicate the dumping
process.
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