Timwi wrote:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
Another question, though: Does someone who creates a derived work from one of our articles have to link back to the actual version of the article that they used to create the derived work, or is linking to the current version of the article acceptable?
I'm in no way an expert, but looking at the practical implications of such a requirement, it would seem that such a requirement would make the GFDL useless for most purposes. Hardly any webmaster would archive every past version of a page.
Well, the GFDL doesn't actually require that the original work be provided at all; only that the derived work itself be provided in "transparent" form. With normal text this just means that you have to provide the derived work; with wiki-text, since "transparent" is derived as the wiki-markup version, someone who makes an HTML/ASCII/whatever derived work would have to provide the wiki-text, which is sometimes onerous to make them do. Thus you can just let them link to wikipedia, where the text can be found. I think reading the GFDL it actually is the exact work you derived from that legally should be provided, but as all past versions are archived by wikipedia anyway, simply linking to the wikipedia page should suffice. If someone wanted to be pedantic they could link to the specific page in the history instead of the "current version," but I think that would have adverse consequences (like people reading out of date articles). At most I think it might be reasonable for them to cite the date they took it off wikipedia, and then someone can search through the page history themselves to find that version (citing the date you used an online source is a pretty good idea anyway).
-Mark