[Foundation-l] Help page mirroring and non-GFDL projects

Thu Nov 10 21:12:16 UTC 2005

Hi, this is something I asked on irc in #wikimedia earlier today, so
apologies to those of you who have already read this.

On projects like Wikinews which do not use the GFDL, Mediawiki Help
pages are still copied from Meta to the Help: namespace as an aid to
editors.  However, I noticed that for these pages, (for instance,
<http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Help:Diff>), the only copyright notice is
the Wikinews default on the bottom of the page: "All content created
after September 25, 2005 is available under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 2.5 License unless otherwise specified."  Of
course, at the top of the same page, it is acknowledged that the text
is copied from <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Diff>, which, like
all pages on Meta, carries the legend "Content is available under GNU
Free Documentation License."

My question is, is the Wikinews page kosher with the GFDL?  If so,
why?  If not, what specifically must be done to make it compliant?

As I first started poking around these pages on behalf of a non-WMF
MediaWiki instance that would also like to mirror Help pages from Meta
locally, I would appreciate it if the general case of a non-GFDL wiki
using GFDL help pages could be addressed, and not just the particular
instance of Wikinews.  Since we're brand-new and haven't chosen a
license yet, this will influence our direction in coming to a decision
there.

Many thanks for your time,

--Michael Noda