[WikiEN-l] Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com (fwd)

Tue Jul 8 18:36:32 UTC 2003

This is the message I sent.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2003 17:15:39 +0100 (BST)
From: Oliver Pereira <omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: Russ McNeil <russmcneil at malaspina.org>
Subject: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

Dear Dr. McNeil,

I discovered your "Malaspina Great Books" website today, and found that
you have included quite a few biographical articles adapted from Wikipedia
in your database. I'm an editor at Wikpedia, and I should point out that
the articles there are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (or
GFDL), which says that if you want to copy material covered by this
licence, you need to release your copies under the same licence.

See the "Wikipedia:Copyrights" page at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACopyrights

and the text of the GFDL at:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AText_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

I am not a lawyer, and I'm not sure *exactly* what you have to do to
licence your copies of the articles under the GFDL, but you have to at
least say on each page that the text is licenced under the GFDL, and you
have to link to the text of the GFDL as well. Perhaps you could link to
the copy of the GFDL on the GNU website itself:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html

Perhaps it would be worthwhile asking what you have to do on the WikiEN-L 
mailing list <wikien-l at wikipedia.org> or just come along to the Wikipedia 
website itself and ask there.

Oliver

+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira                            |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton                 |
| omp199 at ecs.soton.ac.uk                    |
+-------------------------------------------+