[Wikipedia-l] a loophole of GFDL & modification of a document

[Tomos at Wikipedia]

Among some Japanese wikipedians, there are some concerns about legality of 
certain editing practices -
translating article, cut-and-pasting from one page to another (such as 
archiving village pump talk, spining out a section of a long article to 
create a new article), merging two articles into one, etc.

Your opinions, pointers to relevant discussions (past or ongoing), or a 
pointer to a more appropriate place to ask this kind of help would be 
greatly appreciated.

(By the way, Village Pump is called Bistro or Cafe in some other wikipedias 
that I could read - for those who are not familiar with English wikipedia.)

These editing constitutes "modification" of a document according to GDFL, 
and it has to fulfill certain requirements such as including the history 
section of the original document into the new one (4-I).

To practice this literally would be to copy and paste the list of usernames& 
IPs and time stamps of the whole Village Pump into a new page, perhaps after 
the body text. That's somewhat inconvenient and impractical. Translating a 
page from one language to another, in part or in whole, would require the 
same.

(Well, of course, you may say worrying about this kind of potential 
copyright violation is rather impractical)

But it seems that the text of GFDL allows us a work around. As long as we 
copy in verbatim, we do not have to include the history section, it seems. 
Not even link back to the original, if the copy is "transparent." So, if one 
copies a whole text in verbatim from village pump to some other page, 
without history section, that would be okay. Then, after copying in 
verbatim, one can edit that copy, and save. That would not violate GFDL, 
either.

In translating article, one can copy an original text in verbatim to another 
wikipedia, and save first. Then edit the copy, translating or making other 
changes. That would be GFDL compliant.

Also, as I understand, this is the way projects like Internet-Encyclopedia 
is working.

In non-wikipedia case, one can first reproduce 101 transparent, verbatim 
copies of a manual for a free-software. Those copies do not have the history 
section, but that's okay. And then, one can take one of those history-less 
copies, make modification, and release under GFDL. That would be okay as 
well.

I think the purpose of 4-I is to ensure the attribution and traceability of 
the older versions of the document. But it seems there is a work around for 
those who wants to reduce those info. (I cannot come up with a vivid 
illustration of this, but I hope I am making sense.)

regards,

Tomos

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