Re: Many references to wikipedia

From: "Gunnar" <[email protected]>
...
> And I would also like to have a list of articles that I have read but
don't
> make explicit use of, things that are more or less commonly known, but
just
> have the references there for the interested reader, and also to give some
> credit.
>
> But are you acctually allowed to make fair use citations with GFDL?

I am not sure what "fair use citations" are. Generally speaking as
knowledge is not copyrightable, it is not a necessity to invoke copyright
law (and hence the fair use or fair dealing provisions thereto) if one is
merely citing the work of another in a knowledge context (this may not
be true in the area of internet commerce, but that is not the topic here).
How
could it be otherwise? You need permission to cite an author's work,
or use a brief quotation to explain the author's point of view in an
article that is explaining that particular approach to a topic? I don't
think
so. Knowledge (unless proprietary) belongs to everyone.

Fair use is more specific and deals with copying significant amounts
of a copyright holder's work and the invocation of fair use has to do
with what you are doing with the work, i.e. you must specifically examine
your work and your use of the work (i.e. how you distribute it and how
it effects the ability of the copyright holders' ability to commercially
exploit the work).

Making such a determination is beyond the scope of this list and would
require a legal opinion from a copyright lawyer. Nothing stated on this
list (or on Wikipedia in general) should be taken as a "legal opinion" or
"legal advice". see: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Legal_advice

Of course, like everything else the difference between what is not covered
by copyright and what is covered by fair use can be a gray area so if what
you are talking about is combining fair use and citation then you do need
a legal opinion to figure that out. That is normally called "due dilligence"
and there are people who do that for a living in publishing.

Alex756