GFDL violation

A GFDL vilation is a violation of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Many GFDL violations occur when GFDL corpus access providers fail to provide links to source materials. The licence requires users to "Preserve the network location, if any, given in the Document" if it is in fact given in the document, not in associated text added by a service.

When they republish GFDL text that has been published by other providers, such as Wikipedia, the largest and best known source of GFDL content on the net, some providers omit the link to the location where it can be edited, corrected or otherwise fixed.

Other types of GFDL violations include:

• failing to credit the top five contributors when a document is exported via XML - this is quite diificult to do without a wiki identity standard
• failing to permit retrieval of any page's source text, even to trolls
• failing to respect the status of Secondary Sections and Invariant Sections or respect the obligations implied by the latter

The Inquirer ran an article on this which asked for email regarding violations.