On 3/15/07, David Hanson behindtheateball@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