[Wikipedia-l] Translations between different wikipedias, and GFDL

Tue Nov 8 00:11:10 UTC 2005

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Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 11/6/05, Gerrit Holl <gerrit at nl.linux.org> wrote:
> 
>>Habj wrote:
>>
>>>According to GFDL, one must always state what work under GFDL the
>>
>>present
>>
>>>work is based on. Is this true also for translations between different
>>>wikipedias? I have heard both "yes" and "no" stated as an answer to
>>
>>this.
>>
>>If I take that literally, article revision N should always explicitly
>>state that it's based on article revision (N-1), or does it?
>>
>>Gerrit.
> 
> 
>  Well, the only sane way to apply the GFDL to Wikipedia is to treat the
> revisions as contributions toward a joint work, not to treat each individual
> edit as creating a new version under the GFDL. All of this is just
> speculation, though, there isn't really an explicit statement as to exactly
> how to apply the GFDL to Wikipedia.
>  For translations the previous version should be stated in the section
> entitled history. The most straightforward way to do that would be to add a
> section entitled history to the article itself. One could argue that this
> requirement is met by simply adding a note in the edit summary, but this is
> a somewhat tenuous argument. You could also argue that there is an implicit
> license, or that any co-author in a joint work has certain rights beyond the
> GFDL, but these would be completely untested waters.
> 

I believe that the revision history itself is considered part of the
work (since it contains the authorship infomation); the annotations
provided in the edit summaries, which may included statements such as
"translated from (interwiki)(article)(revision)" are a significant part
of this. Where talk pages exist, these too rightly form part of the
article, especially where the history of a transwiki is contained in them.

Further discussions on this matter should probably go to juriwiki-l...

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