[WikiEN-l] disclaimer at the bottom of pages

[Stephen Bain]

On 7/12/05, Mark Ryan <ultrablue at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi :)
> 
> The protection referred to there is not Wikipedia's Page Protection
> mechanism, but the legal protection which copyrighted works are given
> in courts. You should see that message whenever you view an old
> revision of *any* page, protected or otherwise. That message is there
> in case an old version of an article is a copyvio, and it is
> subsequently reverted as a result. In such a situation, we do not
> automatically remove the old revisions from the database, and so the
> copyvio may live on in the page's history. This notice advises the
> reader to the risk of this.
> 
> If you weren't looking at an old version of the protected page when
> you came across this disclaimer, then you may have encountered a bug.
> 
> ~Mark Ryan
> 

Mark is absolutely right. All current revisions are generally presumed
to be GFDL-compatible, however there is absolutely no guarantee that
previous revisions are GFDL-compatible. There might be a case for
including in the MediaWiki software a method for deleting individual
revisions from an article's history when it is revealed that an edit
incorporated copyvio content.

The reference to the US Code is there because the Wikipedia servers
(or at least most of them - aren't there some in France now?) are
physically located in Florida.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com