[WikiEN-l] Controversial user nicknames

Wed Aug 27 19:56:18 UTC 2003

I wrote:

> I think this whole thing is unfortunate though, and it's becoming 
> increasingly clear that the GFDL exactly as written isn't *really* 
> what we want to do.  I think most Wikipedians would be happier with a 
> license that required Wikipedia to be credited rather than five 
> authors.  As it stands now, the republisher *has* to credit five 
> authors, but does *not* have to credit Wikipedia at all.  They could 
> give it their own name and not mention its connection to us at all, as 
> long as they list the authors properly.  I think most of us would 
> prefer the opposite -- that they be required to credit Wikipedia, and 
> not be required to credit the individual authors.  But this would 
> require a license change, which may be impossible at this point.

A thought occured to me, though I'm not sure if it's feasible or not.  
Our license is "the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any 
later version published by the Free Software Foundation."  This "or any 
later version" is generally added explicitly to allow the FSF to correct 
any license deficiencies that weren't realized until later.  Now 
certainly the FSF isn't going to release a 
specially-crafted-for-Wikipedia license, but would they FSF possibly be 
amenable to adding a clause to the GFDL permitting collaborative 
projects to be optionally credited by the name of the project rather 
than the individual authors?  This would be a fairly general addition it 
seems, possibly useful to projects other than Wikipedia.  Certainly a 
lawyer would have to see if there's a legally reasonable way to word 
such a requirement.  But it'd (hopefully) have the effect that a 
republisher could credit "Wikipedia" and in so doing be absolved from 
the requirement to credit five individual authors, which really seems to 
be what we want.

Any thoughts?  Is this one of those 'not gonna happen' things?

-Mark