[WikiEN-l] GFDL - Have to mention only authors or Wikipedia too?

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 2/21/06, Heinz <h-j.luecking at t-online.de> wrote:
> Of cource citing is always polite and good scientific behavior.
> But my question has a more legal background.
>
> MUST i cite wikipedia - according to GFDL -- or is citing of authors enough?
>
> Heinz.

The name of the foundation is the "Wikimedia Foundation", not
"Wikipedia", so even if you consider the foundation to be a publisher
(I believe they take the position that they are not), the GFDL makes
no mention of citing the name of the website on which the document was
first published.  It does require that you "preserve the network
location, if any, given in the Document for public access to a
Transparent copy of the Document, and likewise the network locations
given in the Document for previous versions it was based on."  I
suppose one could interpret that to mean that you must preserve the
edit link, which would contain a url pointing to wikipedia.

The GFDL also requires that you give the authors and publisher.

It's all pretty hard to understand, because the Wikimedia Foundation
itself doesn't even follow the GFDL.

Anthony