Sheldon Rampton wrote:
I want to do some Wikipedia articles based on Disinfopedia articles. They're GFDL. But what is the proper way to carry over authorship information? Cut'n'paste the Disinfopedia page history (they use MediaWiki too) to the Talk page? Acknowledgement link at the bottom of the page, as we use for FOLDOC or Jargon File-based articles?
When I use material from the Wikipedia in the Disinfopedia, I put in a line of attribution at the bottom of the article. For example, Disinfopedia's [[Richard A. Clarke]] article includes the following line at the bottom, with links back to Wikipedia article:
Not long ago, I did one of my very rare edits and changed the article on the [[Cato Institute]]. (Someone from Cato wrote to me about a factual error.) I found a lot of good information at Disinfopedia, and I copied some of it in -- I credited in Disinfopedia in the comment field, but that's all I did.
I regard this as one of the main problems with the current version of the GNU FDL, i.e. that friendly copying of small bits of text between different GNU FDL texts is needlessly complicated in a wiki context where everyone is perfectly happy with such copying.
In the case of Disinfopedia, which is clearly a friend project to ours, there's no real issue with some degree of casual borrowing back and forth where appropriate. After all, Sheldon isn't going to sue us for using a few paragraphs from his site, and vice-versa.
But in the general case, it would be much better if the license specifically allowed for genorous "fair-use-style" copying, so that people could do this sort of thing without having to worry.
--Jimbo