[Wikipedia-l] Preserving GFDL requirements when splitting articles

Mon Nov 21 03:20:35 UTC 2005

Anthony DiPierro wrote:

> Wikipedia's use of the GFDL is already absurd.  If you want to 
> make any sense of things you have to look beyond the GFDL.

Dual licensing is not uncommon, with MySQL software often 
mentioned as an example.

In a wiki without any mention of a license (I think c2.com falls 
in this category, and susning.nu certainly does), the wiki system 
itself silently implies that articles can be edited and refactored 
by other users, and that an entire text paragraph can be cut out 
of one article and pasted into another within the same wiki.  
People who save their contribution to any wiki can be assumed to 
have agreed to this "implicit wiki license".  In the case of 
Wikipedia, this is de facto a dual licensing with GFDL, where the 
implicit license includes recipies being moved to Wikibooks, 
dictionary definitions being moved to Wiktionary, source texts 
being moved to Wikisource, and articles being translated and 
reused in other languages of Wikipedia.  Because that is how the 
system works, and you better know this when you contribute.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se