[Foundation-l] GFDL Q&A update and question

[Brian]

Another question: Given the WMF admission in the FAQ that the GFDL has *
never* been followed in re-use of Wikipedia content due to the insane
difficulty of doing so, and given its rampant  "illegal" re-use on the web,
and the WMF's ignoring this illegal re-use for years on end, what chance is
there that a court of law would find that the GFDL actually applies to this
content were someone to sue a re-user?

Isn't it true that the efforts to force re-users to appropriately atrribute
the content have not actually asked them to follow the letter of the GFDL?

Is a license that is never enforced truly a license, in the legal sense?

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:04 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:

> I'm curious (and not arguing it is the case) why due diligence here does
> not involve e-mailing every person who has ever made an edit and has their
> e-mail address in their profile.
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:59 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>> Mike & I have made some updates to the Q&A today:
>>
>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers
>>
>> Please let me know or edit the page if you feel further clarifications
>> and answers are needed. Otherwise I'll prepare a translation request,
>> probably on Friday.
>>
>> Meanwhile, I'm also working on the actual re-licensing proposal, so
>> that we can discuss it with the Board this weekend. One question I'm
>> struggling with, and would appreciate input on, is what voting method
>> and process should be used to make the decision. I anticipate that it
>> will be a simple yes/no vote, possibly with an explicit abstain
>> option. I can see two approaches to implement the actual vote:
>>
>> 1) Use the BoardVote software. It's secure, well-tested and
>> well-understood. It's more burdensome to set up, the process for
>> counting votes is quite rigorous (accurate but burdensome), and it may
>> be overkill for this purpose. Votes are private.
>> 2) Use a vote on Meta, like we did for e.g. the Wikinews and
>> Wikiversity project launch votes. It's easy, but suffers from edit
>> conflicts, and accurate vote counting is hard. Votes are public.
>>
>> In the second case, the vote result would be less defensible - but
>> since it's not a legal necessity to run a vote at all, that might be
>> OK. It would be also easier to add comments, have detailed discussions
>> on the talk page, etc. Importantly, since this is a complex problem,
>> misunderstandings may be common, and in a public vote, they could be
>> more easily corrected. In the first case, we could add a prominent
>> link to the full proposal, the Q&A and all discussions to the voting
>> interface, but it would still be a less wiki-like way of doing things.
>>
>> I'd appreciate thoughts & comments.
>>
>> --
>> Erik Möller
>> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>>
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>
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