On 8/18/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@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