Books by Wikimedia Foundation Options

[mbz1]

I've noticed recently that there are many ebooks published by Wikimedia Foundation. Let's for example take a look at this one
in particular at the section named "Etymology" (scroll down to the page #1). Please compare this section to this section of Wikipedia article.
The article is free, the book is $2.51. Why?

This post has been edited by mbz1:

[Fusion]

But of course The Wikimedia Foundation is not the author. If asked, its board and staff would strongly deny being the authors because if they were they could be sued! So firstly that is misleading. Secondly it is surely a breach of copyright. Do these books give full references to the individual Wikipedia articles and their histories? I suppose ideally they should print the histories as an appendix.

[mbz1]

But of course The Wikimedia Foundation is not the author. If asked, its board and staff would strongly deny being the authors because if they were they could be sued! So firstly that is misleading. Secondly it is surely a breach of copyright. Do these books give full references to the individual Wikipedia articles and their histories? I suppose ideally they should print the histories as an appendix.

Quite a few of my images were published in the books with not exactly the same attributions I released them with. Using the same attributions the images are released with is required by the license.
I emailed about this to WMF, and got a response that their legal "is looking into it." (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wtf.gif)

This post has been edited by mbz1: