Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 12/24/05, Dariusz Siedlecki datrio@gmail.com wrote:
The GFDL license states:
B. List on the Title Page, as authors, one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this requirement.
Now, you see - in the current database dumps, which are used on most of the Wikipedia mirrors (both online and offline), there's only the very last contributor.
Wouldn't it be wiser to add the authors of the article, even if their revisions should stay empty?
We provide all of the authors in the _full dumps. It is your responsibility to download the attribution if you want it. The GFDL obligates us to provide it, and we have fulfilled that obligation we are not required to shove it down your throat if you do not wish to download it.
Your complaint implies that someone could not distribute a GFDLed book on the web in page-per-chapter form because only the title page has attribution, clearly this can not be the case.
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).
Magnus