On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
koyaanis qatsi wrote:
Not to be a wag, but how can we reconcile
anonymous
contributions of any stripe--including ones that
aren't logged in--with the FDL?
Those are pseudonyms. Nothing about the FDL requires authors to give
their 'real names'. However an author chooses to identify themselves
is good enough.
An author does not choose their IP address. In the vast majority of cases,
they won't even know their IP address, or even what an IP address is! You
cannot claim that an author is "choosing" to use a name if they don't even
know what that name is.
Pick an AOL IP
address and try to assign it to one author, without
AOL's help. Impossible.
Sure, and lots of people have the same names, too.
It is common in ordinary printed works for authors with names shared by
other authors to be disambiguated in some way, for example by the use of
middle initials. It is also common to have a paragraph of text about the
author, saying who they are, possibly even explicitly telling people not
to confuse them with another identically named person. Reasonable lengths
are usually gone to to ensure that different authors are distinguished
from each other.
If, as you seem to be asserting, the attribution requirements of the GFDL
allow firstly for an author's "name" to be assigned by an external party,
without the author's knowledge or consent, and secondly for no effort to
be gone to to ensure that the "name" thus assigned corresponds to a single
individual, then it follows that citing "the author" as the author of any
piece of work is perfectly acceptable. If this sort of thing was really
what the authors of the GFDL intended to be allowed, then they wouldn't
have even included a requirement for authors to be listed. Interpreted as
you seem to be interpreting it, the requirement would be entirely
redundant. Clearly this is not what the authors of the GFDL intended.
I think any reasonable interpretation of the idea of listing authors would
have the following two properties:
(1) The name of the author, even if it is a pseudonym, should be agreed by
that author.
(2) Reasonable lengths should be gone to to make the name as near to
unique as is feasible. (In a database, there is no reason for this not be
become just plain "unique".)
The GNU FDL only requires redistributors to pass along
at least 5
names of prior contributors, not that the prior contributors be hunted
down and investigated for their 'real' names.
Even if it is agreed that pseudonyms are acceptable, it is still true that
the current system doesn't even require *them*.
Perhaps the edit page should have a notice saying, "This edit will be
attributed to you under the pseudonym [some unique identifier here]. If
you do not wish to use that pseudonym, you may wish to register a user
name or, if you already have one, log in."
That way, by clicking on "Save page", the user really would be agreeing to
use this as their pseudonym. (It would also alert registered users who had
been automatically logged out to the fact that this had happened. This has
happened to me before, and I haven't noticed.)
Then you really could claim that the user has chosen to use this as a
pseudonym, and different pseudonyms would correspond to different people.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+