[WikiEN-l] Update to gfdl copyright notice needed

Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia at math.ucr.edu
Sun Sep 7 21:13:10 UTC 2003


There is the dual issue of the notice to /users/ of our material:
[[en:Wikipedia talk:Sites that use Wikipedia for content#Suggested notice]].
The basic idea is that maybe so many sites are violating the GNU FDL
(and usually, it seems, unknowingly and without any evil intent)
because the brief text at the bottom of each page is unclear.

The text currently reads:

 <small>All text is available under the terms of
 the [[GNU FDL|GNU Free Documentation License]].<small>

Note that [[en:GNU FDL]] redirects to [[en:Wikipedia:Copyrights]] (!).
Between clarity, conciseness, and links that make sense,
the current version has been edited and ended up as:

 <small>All text is available under the terms of the
 [[Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License|
 GNU Free Documentation License]].
 See [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]] for suggested practices.</small>

I await confirmation from MB that my reversion of his last change is OK;
otherwise, the above seems to be agreed upon by the participants.

So first, we link directly to the text of the GNU FDL.
Next, links go where they naively appear to go.
Also, this frees [[en:GNU FDL]] to redirect where it should,
which is [[en:GNU Free Documentation License]].
Finally, we point out that there are "suggested practices",
so that people see a reason to look at [[en:Wikpedia:Copyrights]]
even if they're already familiar with the GNU FDL.
(For example, the GNU FDL doesn't require a link back to us,
since the requirement to provide authorship credits
can be done without that.  But we'd really prefer it!)


-- Toby



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