[WikiEN-l] GFDL and Wikipedia:Copyright problems (was: BLP, and admin role in overriding community review)

[Garion96]

On 5/25/07, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
>
> On May 24, 2007, at 3:34 AM, Charlotte Webb wrote:
> > Generally speaking, that would violate the terms of the GFDL, which
> > requires us to maintain documentation of all changes that are made.
> >
> > Sometimes sloppy workarounds are used, such as pasting a dump of the
> > edit history (really just a list of usernames/IPs, timestamps, and
> > edit summaries) in a prominent location, such as the talk page (this
> > is usually used for pages that get transwikied to another project).
>
> For this reason, I advocate deleting and rewriting from scratch in
> cases where we feel
> some significant portion of the history is problematic.
>
> We do have the ability to write an amazing amount of material really
> really quickly.  The
> feeling that we have to carefully save every word forever is outdated.
>
> --Jimbo


The same problem is in Wikipedia:Copyright problems. Is it compliant with
the GFDL to clean up an article through a temporary page? Since this way it
looks like all the edits come from (usually) one editor, while the other
original edits are deleted. Which still are in the history for admins of
course but not for readers and mirrors. One example is
Histiocytosis<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histiocytosis>,
and many other examples since this is the usual way of cleaning up copyvio's
with the copyvio template.

See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copyright_problems#Temp_article_and_GFDL

Garion96