--- Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Simon's questions were specifically about how it is that the license permits us to require the inclusion
of an HTML linkback in the invariant sections. In my first response, I answered that question, though of course more details may come out in the course of further discussion.
However, here I want to explain why the attribution requirement is important and a good thing.
[snip] I think requiring some form of acknowledgement and a linkback is a good thing. And even though I don't think you can force someone to put a linkback on every page under the FDL, I think that for them to do so is a good idea. The thing I'm not so keen on is telling people what format to put the linkback in -- a particular HTML table.
I think making people do that might be fine if they are running some site crawling with tables, like Yahoo or Microsoft do. But if all I want to do is put some articles on a website, that isn't crawling with tables, why can't I simply but up something at the end saying, e.g., "This page was originally based on an article from Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Mathematics)".
That is basically what Wikipedia at present does with other FDL or public domain sources. We stick in a simple attribution line at the end, we don't throw in some big table. Why should Wikipedia insist other sites do what it doesn't? (Admittedly, these other sites don't ask us to.)
[snip] Simon J. Kissane
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