[Foundation-l] WMF as publisher as in GFDL

Tue Dec 7 23:11:41 UTC 2004

wiki_tomos wrote:

>  I would like a few things to be decided/ clarified regarding GFDL,
>  partly because I received some complaint by another Wikipedian that
>  GFDL is so difficult to understand that there needs to be an
>  unofficial guide to how to use Wikimedia contents in compliance with
>  GFDL.
>
>  1. Is Wikimedia Foundation the "Publisher" as in GFDL of Wikimedia
>  contents?

That would be my interpretation. For items published before the 
Wikimedia Foundation came into existence, you could probably consider 
the publisher to be either Bomis or Jimbo Wales.

>  2. When people modify documents, one of the requirements is to change
>  the title, as in 4-A. The publisher of the original version may
>  permit the licensee to use the same title. Does Wikimedia Foundation
>  permit that?

No, not if you consider the entire project to be the document. It has 
registered the various project names as trademarks to reinforce its 
exclusive ownership. If it gave any contributor permission to use the 
same title, then anyone could start a fork of Wikipedia with the same name.

>  3. Another requirement is 4-J, the preservation of network locations
>  of previous versions. Does Wikimedia Foundation give permission not
>  to preserve the network locations?

No statement has been made that I'm aware of.

>  My understanding is that answers to all three questions are yes. But
>  I am a bit unsure about the last one.
>
>  People tend to think link to the live article is important, as I
>  understand. Some people, based on American law, think this is a good
>  substitute for the requirement 4-I, the preservation of History
>  section. That aside, link back to individual articles are important
>  for us to keep google rank.
>
>  I personally think this is not the part of contract, because the live
>  article is not necessarily the "previous version." But Wikimedia
>  Foundation's enforcement policy would be that if live articles are
>  linked back from individual pages, and some other important
>  conditions are met, WMF does not make a big noise about violation of
>  4-I.
>
>  In other words, my understanding is that WMF does not change the
>  terms of GFDL, but simply has some policy as a publisher regarding
>  what type of violations are bad enough for WMF to take actions.

Wikipedia's policy (not Wikimedia's) has been to coerce mirrors and 
forks into providing a link back by huffing and puffing about license 
violations, even though a link back is not required by the license. All 
you need to do to fulfill 4-I is create a "History" section like this:

HISTORY
    * Some Mirror, 2004, John Copier, http://somemirror.org
    * Wikipedia, 2000-2002, Wikipedia contributors, http://www.wikipedia.org
    * Marxists Internet Archive, 2002, MIA volunteers, 
http://www.marxists.org
    * Nupedia, 2000-2001, Nupedia contributors, http://www.nupedia.org 
(see Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia for a list of articles this applies to)

That's taken from [[Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)]]. Since it's 
unofficial, you could assume it doesn't exist and just start your own 
section, omitting the 3rd and 4th entries.

Wikimedia doesn't have any policy on this. The link back policy appears 
to have destroyed our Google ranking, triggering spam heuristics. In 
many cases we are ranked below the mirrors. This has forced Google to 
consider a change to their ranking algorithm.

>  I am not a lawyer, so my guesses and assumptions could well be wrong.
>  I appreciate your comments and clarifications.

Same here.

-- Tim Starling