[Wikipedia-l] Re: About copyright violations

[sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca]

David Grant wrote:

<snip>
> This is in order to stop the ripping of
> Wikipedia articles without full copyright/license compliance.

I'm not against having more detailed license instructions with our 
articles, but as Jimbo has said, we might want to play it cool with 
license enforcement. The reason we chose the GFDL was so that 
people would use our articles and let others use what they make 
with them. As long as it seems that people are following the spirit 
of the license (saying it's GFDL and from Wikipedia), we probably 
don't want to generate ill-will by accusing them of doing something 
wrong.

Frankly, the GFDL is a bit of a monsterous beast, and we're not in 
compliance either. Some examples, most of which have been 
discussed earlier:

There is no way for a non-sysop to retrieve the source text, i.e. the 
wiki-markup, of protected pages. This arguably violates the 
requirement to make a "transparent version" available... although 
not necessarily, as the article is still available in HTML.

We've incorporated material from the Free Online Dictionary of 
Computing without providing a list of authors (this can't be solved 
by our linkbacks, as FOLDOC doesn't provide a list either), nor a 
history of changes from the original (if we simply import the entire 
FOLDOC entry, and we had no article there in the first place, our 
article history works fine. However, if we don't import the entire 
article, or we merge it with material we already have, our history 
doesn't cover all the changes to the original FOLDOC article).

In order to apply the license, we are supposed to have this notice 
somewhere:

Copyright (c)  YEAR  YOUR NAME.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this 
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation 
License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free 
Software Foundation with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover 
Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license is included 
in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".

Problems: Whose name can we put there ("Wikipedians", 
perhaps)? Do we put it on the main page only (thus treating 
Wikipedia as a single document) or on each article page (thus 
treating each article as a separate document)?

... and so on. In short, the GFDL was designed for book-like 
software documentation written by individuals, not wikis with 
collaborative (and even anonymous) authorship. So, if people are 
using our material without mentioning Wikipedia and/or the GFDL, 
send a letter. Otherwise, let's cut them some slack.

Stephen Gilbert

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