On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Brian <brian.min...@colorado.edu> wrote: > I advocate a much more flexible attribution scheme than listing the authors > or printing a url to the history page. I think a simple (Wikipedia) is a > sufficient attribution for text. If you have the text it is trivial to find > the original author of that text. It's not so trivial with images, but a > link to the history page of an image can be embedded in its metadata.
Precisely, and once you have this as a minimum standard you can still do whatever you like on top of it. As significant bonuses we're not diluting/drowning out the promotion of Wikipedia and we're avoiding situations where authors can go after [re]users for infringement; effectively the power of enforcement would be vested in Wikipedia (but not the copyright itself so we don't have to worry about WMF turning evil, only new license releases which must be 'similar in spirit' anyway). The attribution instructions could go something like: "You must attribute Wikipedia, should reference the name of the article (with hyperlinks where appropriate) and may also credit the authors which can be found on the history tab." I've also been thinking more about the possibility of identifying key contributors for attribution and I've come to my own conclusion that it's a non-starter. If you start attributing some people but not others then those who are not attributed (who would otherwise not care had the attribution have been for Wikipedia) will get justifiably upset and may well seek to enforce their 'right' to attribution. The only way "to shake out some authors" reliably (as Andrew just said) is to do it manually, which is another avenue for conflict and resource wastage. Summary: author attribution is an all or nothing thing; either you attribute a boundless list of 'names' in 2pt font or you attribute nobody. Anyway I have to get back to writing 'AttriBot' so I can stamp my name on any article with <5 authors ;) Sam _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
