[Foundation-l] WikiGadugi Wikipedia Rating???

[Robert Scott Horning]

Dominic McDevitt-Parks wrote:

>In order to comply: You must link to a local copy of the GFDL, you must 
>make it clear that the content from Wikipedia is available under the 
>GFDL license, your materials in turn have to be licensed under GFDL, you 
>must credit Wikipedia and link back to the source article. We also 
>recommend that you include the date of the version copied, so that one 
>is able to clearly figure out the authors by checking the history tab 
>(it will likely have changed since you copied the content, and the 
>authorship will have changed, too).
>
>Dominic
>
>  
>
While I would agree that a "local copy" is a good idea, it is not in a 
very strict sense necessary.  All that is necessary is to have a copy 
that is accessable through the network you are using, somehow.  Having a 
local copy means that it is accessable at the same time the rest of the 
site is up/down.

As for the requirement to have the content link to the original source 
article, that is not necessary either.  It may be a good idea, but it is 
not required by the GFDL, nor a legal requirement.  All that is 
necessary is that you credit five authors of the text, presumably the 
five "leading contributors".  It isn't clear exactly which five, or if 
random vandals on the history page qualify, or what edits done that are 
credited only to an IP address really mean, but only five are strictly 
needed.  The metric for determining the five "leading contributors" is 
certainly a very grey area in terms of what the GFDL asks you for here. 
 Edit count is hardly the best metric for many reasons.

All of the other requirements are completely made up here and are not 
needed by the GFDL.  If this is something the Wikipedia community wants 
to put into here, they ought to change the license that Wikipedia is 
licensed under.  Good luck on trying to do that.  That would mean 
restarting Wikipedia from scratch, essentially.

I'm not suggesting that these are bad recommendations in terms of being 
nice to Wikipedia and helping to grow Wikimedia projects, but be very 
clear that this is what you are saying and not that these are legal 
requirements that are strictly necessary to copy the content, or even 
republish it in the form of another website.  While "good advise" in 
terms of being nice, this is awful legal advise on the whole.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning