GFDL corpus access provider

From dKosopedia

GFDL corpus access providers are increasingly common on the World Wide Web. These distribute some or all articles from the GFDL corpus. They vary widely in editorial conventions and the degree to which they support editing by users. The most important are those which let anonymous users edit:

• Wikipedia - the best known, with its articles being spread the widest
• Wikinfo,
• Sourcewatch,
• Consumerium,
• Anarchopedia,
• dkosopedia itself, though uniquely among the above it will require logins, which most large public wikis consider undesirable

To avoid total confusion, these providers tend to cooperate on naming conventions, resulting in a common GFDL corpus namespace. On any of these services you can expect to find that the article on a subject has the same name, down to the punctuation marks, as a different article on the same subject elsewhere in the corpus. This is a major value of the service. For instance, see U.S. House election, 2006 and Wikipedia:U.S. House election, 2006. The articles are from different point of view but have got the same name for easy cross-reference.

The GFDL license requires these, or contributors to any of these, to share their improvements effectively. The biggest barrier to this has been Wikimedia, which tries to demand that all use of articles link back to Wikipedia, although its inclusion criteria are not the most permissive, and it constantly removes valid material due to the infamous "rule 5" of the "Wikipedia:candidates for speedy deletion" rules.

Other GFDL-licensed open content distributors, such as nationmaster and wordIQ, provide useful web services, but don't let users edit texts.