[WikiEN-l] joint authorship

[Thomas Dalton]

(Please excuse the extensive quoting, I decided it really was
necessary to include the 3 preceding emails for my email to make
sense.)

> > > 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?revisionid=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?revisionid=2

(or whatever they are) are distinct names. The url without a
revisionid is just a shortcut to the latest revision.

> > > 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?

If we go by the spirit of the license, the transparent copy is the
source shown on the edit page. While the exact wording may require the
history to be editable, you aren't allow to edit it (beyond adding
your name, which is done automatically), so that's a pretty pointless
bit of pedantry. A possible alternative is to consider the database
dumps to be the transparent copy, they aren't as easy to edit, though.

> > > 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.

Ok, I don't know about the legal definitions, but by the everyday
meaning of the word, the WMF is the publisher. They are the one that
makes the content available to the public, that's what the word means.

> > > 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.

You have to "include" a copy of the license. It's not clear if that is
"include as part of the document" or "include with the document when
distributing". If we interpret it as the latter, we're fine.

> > > 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?

I don't see any problem with defining "document" to mean the page
together with the history. And I've given the case for transparent
copies above.