On 8/24/07, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
(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.
Yes, but when revisionid=1 was published it was published as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
I also think it's incredibly odd to call a url the title of an article.
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.
That doesn't contain any of the stuff you're calling part of the document. It doesn't contain the history information, it doesn't contain the GFDL, it doesn't contain the license notice, or a copyright notice - it doesn't even contain the title 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.
It's not pedantry at all. If I want to create a fork of a Wikipedia article, I need a Transparent copy of the entire document. I don't want to go hunting through page after page of history and what links here and all the other stuff I need in order to comply with the license. I want to download a copy of the entire document in a straightforward way, make my edits, add my name to the title page, add a line to the history section, and be done with it. I can't do that with Wikipedia articles, and that's a major material breach of both the word and the spirit of the GFDL.
A possible alternative is to consider the database dumps to be the transparent copy, they aren't as easy to edit, though.
They would also require you to treat the entire database as a single Document. This approach brings us closer to compliance on many parts of the GFDL, but has problems with others. We can go over that approach if you'd like, but you've gotta pick one definition of the Document and stick with it - you can't go back and forth.
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.
I think it's unclear whether or not the WMF is the publisher. But the WMF isn't listed on the title page anyway.
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 think it's clear from reading the entire license that "include" in this case means "include within the Document". But really this is a minor breach compared to the other ones.
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.
The Transparent copy is supposed to include the section entitled History. And you didn't answer what about when pages are merged. Why isn't the history merged? Should it be? Are people who merge pages without merging the history in breach of copyright law?