Wikipedia:Wikipedia commentary/Responses to How to Build Wikipedia, Follow the Spirit of the GFDL

Responses to How to Build Wikipedia (The Cunctator)
Be in Charge and Be Humble - Understand Bias - Redesign the Wikipedia Software as a Community - Make Big Plans on Wikipedia - Avoid Cabals - Follow the Spirit of the GFDL - Be Respectful but Firm

Follow the Spirit and Letter of the GFDL

The GNU Free Documentation License is intended for those who want to build a Jeffersonian intellectual commons. It is not intended for those who want to maintain control over the content through any means other than being demonstrably the authoritative resource.

This means that to follow the spirit the GFDL means that the content of Wikipedia's pages should be considered a public resource which happened to originate on Wikipedia. Perhaps some of the pages would be best served as being primarily worked on by a completely different project; the GFDL ensures that wherever a new project takes credit for their work, Wikipedia also gets credit. Wikipedia should not try to "brand" their work in the way that, for example, DMoz has, which has a very different kind of license.

This does allow bad, selfish, or inconsiderate people and groups to not give credit where credit is due: note how the GNU Project is ignored by Linux partisans, even though the "Linux" operating system (Red Hat Linux, Yellow Dog Linux, etc.) is really an instance of the GNU operating system.

But that's the sacrifice all people who decide to cooperate more than steal make. The GPL and the GFDL are great licenses for people who pretty much just want to share, with just enough protection that other people can't take the knowledge and lock it away.

And I think it's a small sacrifice to make since the benefits are so great.

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See Jimbo Wales/Statement of principles.

See also : Wikipedia commentary