[Wikipedia-l] possible explanation for Spanish 'pedia fork; plus some thoughts...

Tue Jul 9 22:46:32 UTC 2002

On 9 Jul 2002, at 23:07, Jan.Hidders wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 12:56:16PM -0700, Daniel Mayer wrote:
> > 
> > We should consider doing some strategizing to make
> > sure another fork doesn’t happen (I hear members of
> > the French wikipedia threatened a fork in the past).
> 
> Is that really such a big problem? I know it wastes effort but we can
> still copy articles from them and vice versa, right? 

If the arguement is on a superficial issue, i.e. banner adverts, there 
is no reason why the backends (i.e the articles) of both projects 
can't essentially be mirrors of one another.

> But does our
> license then force them to put a link on every article that they have
> copied from the original site?

No, what the licence does say is that,

1) They can't use the name Wikipedia without permission, i.e. they 
have to rename.

2) They can't remove the name of the authors of articles, in the 
case of anonymous articles, this might mean they have to attribute 
Wikipedia.

3) For at least the next four years they will need to acknowledge 
wikipedia.com as the source, but this can be done on a "History" 
page and need not be on every article.

IANAL. But I'm familiar with copyleft licences and their application 
to non-software content.

Imran
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