[Foundation-l] GFDL and disclaimers

[White Cat]

I think we need a more organized way to address this problem.

Some background from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GFDL_standardization

Pursuant to the Text of the GNU Free Documentation License:

*"The Document may include Warranty Disclaimers next to the notice which
states that this License applies to the Document. These Warranty Disclaimers
are considered to be included by reference in this License ..."*

and reusers are obliged to

*"Preserve any Warranty Disclaimers" *

For some time I have been trying to address this issue on my own with my
individual effort. I have not had much success. There still are wikis that
use a forced disclaimer on their GFDL licenses. I believe the disclaimer was
carried from the translation of the English wikipedia's GFDL template that
had such a note.

Many wikis such as the English, Russian, Arabic, Vietnamese wikis have
legally abolished the disclaimer from their standard GFDL template however
some wikis such as the Japanese wikipedia is still using a disclaimer.
Continued usage of disclaimers on {{GFDL}} templates is particularly
problematic because when such images are moved to commons the disclaimer is
not carried with the image. It is a serious pain to try to find and retag
images that were carelessly moved to commons w/o the license.

There is also the matter of wikis illegally abolishing the GFDL disclaimer
by removing it from the template without preserving the warranty disclaimer
as demanded by the GFDL license. All images tagged with a disclaimer version
of the GFDL template must be retagged. To make the matter more complicated,
some such additions and removals of the disclaimer were done accidentally
like how it was done on English wikibooks.

There is a potential legal dispute which may lead to court actions. As
unlikely as that may be, addressing it would nullify the potential.

I have a bot account on many wikis and I can make the necesary fixes on the
wikis such a thing is needed. Determining which wikis had a disclaimer in
what time frame is a different story. I would request a collaborative effort
to address the problem.

    - White Cat