Wikimedia Polska's Statement: the DVD release of Wikipedia in ENTER SPECIAL
Wikimedia Polska's Board Statement regarding the release of the magazine "ENTER SPECIAL 08/2005 Wiedza z Sieci" (Knowledge from the Web)
We want to inform the readers and editors of the Polish Wikipedia, free encyclopedia, and everyone interested, that Wikimedia Polska and Wikimedia Foundation Inc. were not involved in any way with the release of a DVD added to the magazine "ENTER SPECIAL 08/2005 Wiedza z Sieci".
Before the release of the earlier mentioned magazine, no one from the editorial office of ENTER SPECIAL, nor any representative of Lupus Publishing was in talks with anyone from the community of the polish Wikipedia, Wikimedia Polska Association, nor the Wikimedia Foundation.
On the inclosed DVD there could be found a database copy of the Polish Wikipedia from November 2005. The copy did not include any information on the editorial stage of the articles, nor information on copy violation materials (purposed for deletion). The copy does not include edit history, and because of that, it makes it harder for the reader to estimate the propriety of our materials - and to understand the complexity of the GNU Free Documentation License used on the Wikipedia project. Although the GNU FDL license allows anyone to use and distribute the licensed content in any means, even commercialy, it does not mean the author is releasing the text into the public domain. Publishing articles licensed under the GNU FDL license without mentioning the original authors is a serious copyright violation.
We have contacted the editorial office of ENTER SPECIAL, who forwarded our comments on the release (on the 3rd January 2006) to Vogel Burda Communications - the company responsible for publishing a copy of Wikipedia on a DVD attached to the earlier mentioned magazine. So far, no representative of Vogel Burda Communications have contacted us to explain the current situation.
On behalf of the Board of the Wikimedia Polska Association,
Łukasz Garczewski,
President of the Wikimedia Polska Association