[WikiEN-l] joint authorship

[Anthony]

On 8/23/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > A. The title of modified versions is not distinct.
>
> Maybe. You could consider the URL to be the title, in which case they
> are distinct.
>
No, if you consider the URL to be the title, then every modified
version of the page has the same title.

> > B. No authors are listed on the title page.
>
> The authors are listed one page away from the document itself - you
> could even consider the History page to be the title page, I guess.
>
The Title page is part of the Document, not one page away from the
Document, and your definition of "the Document" didn't include what
you call "the History page".  If you want to include as part of the
Document all the history items linked from the page (this is where you
get into convoluted definitions of "the Document" which in the end
don't work anyway), then where is the Transparent copy of the
Document?

> > C. No publisher is listed on the title page.
>
> The publisher is Wikipedia, surely? That's stated in plenty of places.
>
Surely not.  Wikipedia is not an entity.  The Wikimedia Foundation is
an entity, but they specifically state that they are not publishers.

> > D. There are no copyright notices.
> > E. There are no copyright notices.
> > F. There are no copyright notices and no license notice in the form of
> > the addendum listed in the GFDL.
> > H. There is no copy of the license.
>
> Have you looked at the bottom of the page? Where it says "All text is
> available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License." with
> the words "GNU Free Documentation License" linking to a local copy of
> the license?
>
Yes.  That's not a copyright notice, nor is it a license notice in the
form of the addendum listed in the GFDL.  Such a creature would look
like this:

" Copyright (c)  YEAR  YOUR NAME." [the copyright notice]
"  Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
  under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
  or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
  with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
  Texts.  A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
  Free Documentation License"." [the license notice]

There is a link to a copy of the license.  But the GFDL says that the
license is supposed to be part of the document itself.  Make another
strange convolution to the definition of "the Document" and you can
avoid this one, though.

> > I. There is no section entitled History for most pages.  For those
> > pages where there is a section entitled History, it doesn't have any
> > of the required information.
>
> What? Every page has a history... what are you talking about?
>
The section entitled History is part of the Document.  You said the
Document was a single page, which I agree would be the most
straightforward definition.  So a section entitled History, by a
straightforward interpretation, would be something that in wikitext
starts with "==History==".

Now, if you want to incorporate the thing you get when you click on
"history" and then keep clicking next over and over again as part of
"the Document"...

Where is the Transparent copy of the Document?  Where are the previous
titles (to even get "in the spirit" compliance you at least need the
page move history)?  Where is the list of previous publishers?  When
Documents are merged, why isn't the history merged, as required by
seciton 5?  Why is the history tab considered part of the document but
not the talk or edit tab?

If you can answer these questions (no doubt by introducing more
non-intuitive definitions), then you've successfully responded to a
single issue of compliance.  I don't think they all can be answered
though.  One in particular which I can't think of an answer to is
"where is the Transparent copy of the Document".  This is a copy "that
is suitable for revising the document straightforwardly", which in my
humble opinion excludes making people jump through hoops clicking on
link after link reconstructing the Document.

As I figured I got called a troll for pointing this out, which is why
I hesitated before getting into it in the first place.  But it is not
trolling to point out the absolutely obvious fact that Wikipedia does
not fit in any straightforward way into the GFDL.

I think some people might be reading something completely unintended
into this.  I'm *not* accusing anyone of violating copyright law.  In
fact, I believe there are permissions other than the GFDL which
editors have when creating Wikipedia.  It'd be "batshit insane" to
suggest that everyone who ever edited Wikipedia were infringing
copyright.  But it'd likewise be "batshit insane" to suggest that
Wikipedians can do all the things they do merely because they have
permission under the GFDL to do them.