On 7/12/05, Mark Ryan <ultrablue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi :)
The protection referred to there is not Wikipedia's Page Protection
mechanism, but the legal protection which copyrighted works are given
in courts. You should see that message whenever you view an old
revision of *any* page, protected or otherwise. That message is there
in case an old version of an article is a copyvio, and it is
subsequently reverted as a result. In such a situation, we do not
automatically remove the old revisions from the database, and so the
copyvio may live on in the page's history. This notice advises the
reader to the risk of this.
If you weren't looking at an old version of the protected page when
you came across this disclaimer, then you may have encountered a bug.
~Mark Ryan
Mark is absolutely right. All current revisions are generally presumed
to be GFDL-compatible, however there is absolutely no guarantee that
previous revisions are GFDL-compatible. There might be a case for
including in the MediaWiki software a method for deleting individual
revisions from an article's history when it is revealed that an edit
incorporated copyvio content.
The reference to the US Code is there because the Wikipedia servers
(or at least most of them - aren't there some in France now?) are
physically located in Florida.
--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain(a)gmail.com