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List:       wikipedia-l
Subject:    Re: [Wikipedia-l] Preserving GFDL requirements when splitting articles
From:       Heiko Evermann <heiko.evermann () gmx ! de>
Date:       2005-11-21 13:39:35
Message-ID: 200511211439.35950.heiko.evermann () gmx ! de
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Hi Anthony,
> The most important point of non-compliance on the site itself is the
> lack of a title page listing five principal authors and the name of
> the publisher.  
Once an article has a history of e.g. 30 entries, it is no longer feasable to 
identify the 5 principal authors. What makes things even more complicated: 
once you move a certain paragraph into a new article, you would have to find 
the 5 principal authors of this passage. If you insist on being compliant 
here, you can as well prohibit any moval of any content from one article to 
another. Is that what you want?

A proposal by Magnus was interesting:
>While I agree with this, a simple technical solution could be a "copy"
>function, similar to "move". Instead of splitting an article, just
>duplicate it by clicking on "copy" to a new name (and preserving editing
>history), then delete everything not intended for the split-off article.
But unfortunately this does not help at all if the target article already 
exists and you just want to move a passage from one article to another just 
because it fits there better. 

Demanding to mention the 5 principal authors is also impossible, once you try 
to translate an article from en to any other language. 
* There is no way to find out this information from the history of e.g. 
[[creationism]] or [[Jehovah's witnesses]]
* There is no way to cramp this information (just in case you managed to get 
it after all) into the checkin comment.
* You cannot put it into the discussion page, because old discussions might 
get deleted.

So what is your proposal? You are the one who interprets things in this strict 
way. Please make a viable proposal. Otherwise one would have to put Wikipedia 
on hold. There have been lots and lots of edits and translations that violate 
the GFDL (if your interpretation is correct). Lots of pages are in violation 
and would have to be taken down because of copyright infringement. And you 
cannot even know which ones. The only way out then would be to find a more 
suitable licence and to start all over with an empty wiki. But this would be 
a huge waste of resources.

Kind regards,

Heiko Evermann

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