[Wikipedia-l] Marketing: a question

Wed Jul 12 09:31:08 UTC 2006

2006/7/12, Berto <albertoserra at ukr.net>:

> can a newspaper publish an article from a wiki, provided that they quote the
> source page? I am thinking to propose this to a number of small local
> newspapers, but I am not clear on the copyright matter, since these
> newspapers are actually sold. Obviously, it would be just an article, the
> paper is 99,5% made of their own stuff. It would do great to get a better
> media exposure.

I assume that by 'a wiki' you mean 'Wikipedia' here? Being sold is no
problem. The GFDL explicitly allows commercial reuse. The real problem
is that the GFDL requires publication of the complete text of the
license, the 5 major authors and the publication history of the work.
Of these, the last would be the smallest problem, provided we don't
consider each version of a Wikipedia page as a separate edition, in
which case "This article is based on such-and-such Wikipedia article,
version <date>" could be considered enough. The second is problematic
because Wikipedia itself does not keep to the GFDL here - there is no
author list except for the page history. The first has the problem
that the license could easily be as large or larger than the article
itself. Online one can just have it on a different webpage and link to
that, in printed material it's not that easy.

Having said that, Wikimedia policy is for online publication to be
considered adhering to the GFDL when they mention the GFDL and link to
it, and the same with the original Wikipedia page. I think it would be
sensible to have similar requirements for print media, perhaps with a
short description of what the GFDL means added because people cannot
just click a link in a print newspaper. Thus, I would like to allow
this provided the newspaper adds something like:

This article is an adaptation from the Wikipedia article "Nonsense",
which can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense. It falls
under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that it can be
copied and distributed by anyone in modified in modified or unmodified
form as long as the new publication is under the same license. See
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html for the text of the license. A
copy of this article can be found on our website at
http://www.somenewspaper.com/article/08-11/fromwikipedia.htm.

That last line is because  I suddenly remembered another requirement
of the GFDL: One has to have a machine-readable version of the article
available for any and all who request it.

However, I am not speaking here in any kind of official capacity here.
Until the Wikimedia Foundation approves it my statements have no value
whatsoever. And even if the Wikimedia Foundation approves it,
technically all the editors of the article should approve too,
although an approval of the Free Software Foundation instead would
clear up a lot of sky as well.

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels