[WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9 BitTorrent link up

[Peter Ansell]

----- "Erik Moeller" <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> For example, by a literal interpretation, if we consider the version
> history the "history section" that's referenced in the GFDL, any
> derivative would not only have to include author names, but
> everything
> that's currently recorded in the history section for each article,
> which in some cases can be much more information than the article
> itself. See the actual text of the GFDL:
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
> 
> [begin quote]
> # I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and
> add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and
> publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If
> there
> is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating
> the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on
> its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as
> stated in the previous sentence.
> [end quote]
> 
> Attribution for articles with thousands of associated usernames is not
> trivial and potentially very burdensome. This is equally an issue for
> electronic versions as for print, as the size of the actual
> educational content that organizations like SOS children want to
> include already far exceeds the media on which they are able to
> transport it. Storing the entire version history of the article on
> [[France]] means transporting the full meta-information about 9317
> changes.

What happens if they haven't modified the document at all? Do they still have to create the History section if it didn't exist before? How many display-level changes constitute a modification to the document? Is putting a new template on Mediawiki a modification to the underlying documents? Is it unlawful to make up a template that doesn't have links back? What does this mean for plaintext print templates? Does someone have to print out 2000 pages of history along with the actual text in order to lawfully have a copy of the Wikipedia [[France]] article? What does this mean about the eventuality of any paper based reproduction of wikipedia.... GFDL doesn't seem to fit with the knowledge wiki model IMO as it is inflexible and based on arcane production cycles. Is it unlawful for someone not to put an edit comment on when they edit a wikipedia article for instance, as they are not fulfilling their GFDL obligations with describing their new version?

Cheers,

Peter