Hmm. There is an issue which has been raised before by Duncan Harris on the en list:
" The way I see it the Document referred to in the GFDL cannot be an individual Wikipedia article. It has to be the whole of Wikipedia. If the Document were an individual article then Wikipedia would be in breach of its own license. Every time people copy text between articles then they would create a Modified Version under the GFDL. They mostly do not comply with GFDL section 4 under these circumstances on a number of points. So the only sensible interpretations are the whole of English Wikipedia or the whole of Wikipedia as the GFDL Document. This has the following implications for GFDL compliance: - only need to give network location of Wikipedia, not individual articles - only need to give five principal authors of Wikipedia, not of individual articles - no real section Entitled "History", so no requirement to copy that"
I think this is right: article history in practice fails the license terms. I had a look at a couple of articles which was itself a labour of love. In particular you find immediately drafting is not generally done in an article, except first time around for new stubs. For existing articles being reworked, a lot of content is generated/worked out/negotiated on various different talk pages, often not the main article talk page, before moving onto the actual article page using copy and paste. There is also a fair amount of copy and paste when sections are spun out to their own article or articles merged into a main article. In none of these cases does the article history correctly attribute authorship. Main author is even worse as content gets deleted by vandalism and restored so often finding original main contributors is practically impossible.
I think Wikipedia is so far from compliant in the interpretation of the license if we take "one article as a document" that we have to accept that the whole thing is the document in license terms and no history is available.
BozMo ========================================= On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/14 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
IIRC one reason to use wiki/ and w/ instead of "direct" URLs (en.wikipedia.org/Xenu) was to allow for non-article data at a later time (the other reason was to set noindex/nofollow rules). Looks like we will use that space after all :-)
That may be one reason, but I think the main reason is to avoid problems with articles called things like "index.php". /wiki/ is a dummy directory, there's nothing actually there to conflict with, the root directory has real files in it that need to accessible.
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