[WikiEN-l] Our content gets *everywhere*

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/18/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> At the very least they could say "[Taken from
> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature]". While not anywhere near enough for
> GDFL compliance, it's still much better than nothing.

We really make it incredibly difficult for anyone to reuse our text in
this way. It's difficult to find out what you're allowed to do. It's
difficult to work out who the author is. It's difficult to know how
you're supposed to credit them.

It's very easy for us to say that they broke the rules. What were they
supposed to do? We proudly proclaim that Wikipedia is free content.
Then when someone uses it (probably naively), we bitch at them for not
including a verbatim copy of the entire GFDL in their commercial
product and spending hours attempting to determine who to credit for
the lame sentence they took.

It's really one of the greatest failings of Wikipedia so far.

Steve