GFDL corpus namespace

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This is a policy term on the list of policy terms.

The GFDL corpus namespace is the list of over 400,000 words, names, and phrases in English, and over 600,000 more in other languages, that were standardized as the titles of articles in the GFDL corpus over 2001-2004.

Most of this activity occurred in Wikipedia, a large public wiki, that adopted the GFDL as its open content license and mediawiki as its user interface software. Accordingly the namespace is sometimes called the Wikipedia namespace, but, that is inaccurate, as the entire content is under the GFDL and is mirrored or otherwise re-used by very many other GFDL corpus access providers, some of which extend (but do not alter) that corpus and namespace. A notable service of this kind is Wikinfo. Others such as Disinfopedia carry articles on issues or problems that are too specialized for any wikipedia.

The propagation of the namespace across dozens of mirror sites, dominating the google count, and the particularly intense consensus democracy-like process which led to each and every name choice in that space, plus the translation effort, makes it extremely unlikely that the GFDL corpus namespace will ever be displaced by anything that is of similar scope. Unless Encyclopedia Britannica or Compton's or Encarta places its entire namespace in the public domain to compete, the GFDL corpus of articles and its propagation will discipline name use to become more and more like the corpus over time.