[WikiEN-l] Restricting the GFDL license to the namespace

[Kusma]

On 3/15/07, David Hanson <behindtheateball at gmail.com> wrote:
>  At present GFDL includes not only wikipedia articles but talk pages, user
> pages and WP pages. This is entirely necessary and accentuates the risk of
> libelous or defamatory (or just nasty) comments being duplicated on various
> mirrors throughout the web, beyond the reach of editors to delete them.
>
> Since the product of wikipedia, the actual content, are articles and not
> talk pages, administrative pages, user pages etc can we do something to
> limit the GFDL to these pages specifically?

That wouldn't be very practical. It happens quite often that content
is moved between namespaces. For example, articles about Wikipedia are
sometimes moved from the main to the Wikipedia: namespace when they
are seen as not notable enough for a general audience, but interesting
enough for Wikipedians to keep. Users also sometimes work
collaboratively on a draft in user space. All these useful
cross-namespace moves become license violations when different
namespaces use different licenses. Even worse, transclusion of some
namespaces in others would have to be disabled, or the result will be
a confusing mixed-license mess.

Note that most reasonable mirrors do not mirror non-mainspace contents
anyway, and the recommended downloads only give them what they need
for the mainspace.

Kusma