Free Documentation License 1.3

Posted Nov 4, 2008 4:46 UTC (Tue) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804)
In reply to: Free Documentation License 1.3 by slef
Parent article: Free Documentation License 1.3

What were the invariant sections in Wikipedia? The only anecdotal occurance I heard of was reverted not long after it was added.

Free Documentation License 1.3

Posted Nov 4, 2008 8:51 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (1 responses)

Wikipedia hasn't had any invariant sections for a long time. I don't know if it ever did.

Free Documentation License 1.3

Posted Nov 4, 2008 13:30 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

I think the only thing was that it didn't earlier explicitly state that no invariant sections shall be used.

Basically Wikipedia, and also myself somewhere, use the "GFDL with no invariant sections or front/back cover texts" license, which is quite ok as a license. The "DRM" text is indeed a bit bad, though, but it could be worse.

Free Documentation License 1.3

Posted Nov 4, 2008 15:03 UTC (Tue) by slef (guest, #14720) [Link] (1 responses)

I had to go digging around because it seems wikipedia have rearranged their old emails archives and old links now go to irrelevant emails.

The invariant section was an HTML table - here's a copy from November 2001.
http://web.archive.org/web/20011111100123/http://www.wiki...

It was in place at least between 23 October 2001 (when I first find Wikipedia with something resembling a proper application of the FDL) and June 2002. See
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-Jun... and the rest of the thread for the "benevolent dictator" relicensing process of "the invariant section policy of the wikipedia collection is something that I think I have the authority to decide". I don't know how many edits happened in those 8 months or whether nearly half the project's lifetime was "not long".

Free Documentation License 1.3

Posted Nov 5, 2008 2:29 UTC (Wed) by TRS-80 (guest, #1804) [Link]

Wow, I was completely unaware of that.