[Wikipedia-l] Preserving GFDL requirements when splitting articles

Tue Nov 22 20:48:37 UTC 2005

Actually, this is not true. A license is an agreement between 2 people 
and a declaration of will, but you have to interpret it within the 
context. Since it is not possible to respect the text of the GFDL, you 
have not other choice but to understand that it is a declaration of will 
and to intrepret it within context.

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> On 11/19/05, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2005/11/19, Michael Crouch <creidieki at gmail.com>:
>>> I'm trying to improve the English Wikipedia's documentation on article
>>> moves, and I had a GFDL question. I hope this is the right place;
>>> feel free to point me elsewhere.
>>>
>>> Articles on En are often split in a cut-and-paste way, with material
>>> from one article removed and put into another article. None of the
>>> documentation (that I can find) mentions anything about maintaining
>>> the necessary authorship information.
>>>
>>> I've been told several times (on [[Wikipedia:Help desk]] and
>>> [[Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)]]) to simply mention in the edit
>>> summary "This material moved from [[Foo]]". Is this adequate for the
>>> GFDL requirements? I know we might not have a perfect solution to
>>> this, but I didn't want to add anything to the documentation without
>>> making sure it was correct.
>>
>> Simply speaking: No, it is not enough according to the GNU/FDL, but
>> Wikipedia is interpreting the GNU/FDL so freely anyway that adding this to
>> it does not differ much either.
> 
> Wikipedia has no legal right to "interpet the GFDL", when people save
> text they give permission to use the text under a certain license, and
> if you don't follow that license you're guilty of copyright
> infringement.
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