[WikiEN-l] Re: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

Thu Jul 10 00:37:10 UTC 2003

Timwi wrote:

> Oliver Pereira wrote:
>
>> Another question, though: Does someone who creates a derived work 
>> from one
>> of our articles have to link back to the actual version of the article
>> that they used to create the derived work, or is linking to the current
>> version of the article acceptable?
>
>
> I'm in no way an expert, but looking at the practical implications of 
> such a requirement, it would seem that such a requirement would make 
> the GFDL useless for most purposes. Hardly any webmaster would archive 
> every past version of a page.

Well, the GFDL doesn't actually require that the original work be 
provided at all; only that the derived work itself be provided in 
"transparent" form.  With normal text this just means that you have to 
provide the derived work; with wiki-text, since "transparent" is derived 
as the wiki-markup version, someone who makes an HTML/ASCII/whatever 
derived work would have to provide the wiki-text, which is sometimes 
onerous to make them do.  Thus you can just let them link to wikipedia, 
where the text can be found.  I think reading the GFDL it actually is 
the exact work you derived from that legally should be provided, but as 
all past versions are archived by wikipedia anyway, simply linking to 
the wikipedia page should suffice.  If someone wanted to be pedantic 
they could link to the specific page in the history instead of the 
"current version," but I think that would have adverse consequences 
(like people reading out of date articles).  At most I think it might be 
reasonable for them to cite the date they took it off wikipedia, and 
then someone can search through the page history themselves to find that 
version (citing the date you used an online source is a pretty good idea 
anyway).

-Mark