[Foundation-l] deviation from the GFDL in smaller projects

[Amir E. Aharoni]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Amir E. Aharoni
<amir.aharoni at gmail.com> wrote:
> Another Wikipedia has a template on thousands of articles saying that
> they were copied from a copyrighted online encyclopedia and asks the
> editors not to enhance them. (I have to admit that i have limited
> understanding of this language, but i'm pretty sure that i got this
> one correctly.) Unlike in the first example, this is a very well
> established literary language with millions of educated writers.

One thing that i forgot to mention is that i often fix interwiki links
in Wikipedias in other languages in cases of complicated interwiki
conflicts which interwiki bots cannot resolve automatically. Such
fixes must be made across all Wikipedias; if even one Wikipedia is
left unmaintained, the interwiki bots cannot update the links in other
Wikipedias. (Or worse, they may update them incorrectly.)

When i start fixing interwiki links in a group of related articles in
different languages and see such a template on an article in one of
the Wikipedias, what am i supposed to do? I AM NOT *FREE* TO EDIT IT -
i may be infringing the copyright of the author of the original text.
Of course i understand that fixing an interwiki link is a small and
technical edit, but i do not have any warranty that the copyright
holder's lawyers will not sue me for that after seeing my name in the
history.

So i don't have a choice: i don't edit the article in that language,
and i leave the links in other languages unmaintained, too, because
there is no point in a partial resolve of an interwiki conflict.

Of course, that is just one of the implications of not enforcing the
GFDL across all projects.

-- 
Amir Elisha Aharoni

heb: http://haharoni.wordpress.com | eng: http://aharoni.wordpress.com
cat: http://aprenent.wordpress.com | rus: http://amire80.livejournal.com

"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore