Any user name is a copyright pseudonym if it is not a real user's name. The user name (or IP address) is the only way to trace the attribution rights (this is especially inportant in droit d'auteur countries such as Canada where an author's moral rights must be respected, and if someone has questions about the validity of the copyright of the underlying text submitted to Wikipedia the only way to check that is to contact the contributor from Wikipedia (they usually call that 'due diligence' in the copyright chain of title review industry). The GFDL requires that the last five authors of a document released be listed (see section 4(B) of the license). Thus, five contributors to a page may technically have to be listed by any GFDL republisher of that page. Imagine someone who wants to publish a page and finds that one of the authors has an offensive name; they may decide that they cannot morally accept to use such a page because of the offensive character of the author's name which they must acknowledge. If there is an offense username, a controversial name, or one which involves profanity, then this would tend to discourage the redistribution of Wikipedia content. Thus IMHO using an offensive user name is in violation of the spirit of the licensing scheme that we use in order to encourage redistribution of our work. That should be enough reason to prohibit the use of such names. Alex756 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Vicki Rosenzweig" <vr(a)redbird.org> other there.

I wrote: A thought occured to me, though I'm not sure if it's feasible or not. Our license is "the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation." This "or any later version" is generally added explicitly to allow the FSF to correct any license deficiencies that weren't realized until later. Now certainly the FSF isn't going to release a specially-crafted-for-Wikipedia license, but would they FSF possibly be amenable to adding a clause to the GFDL permitting collaborative projects to be optionally credited by the name of the project rather than the individual authors? This would be a fairly general addition it seems, possibly useful to projects other than Wikipedia. Certainly a lawyer would have to see if there's a legally reasonable way to word such a requirement. But it'd (hopefully) have the effect that a republisher could credit "Wikipedia" and in so doing be absolved from the requirement to credit five individual authors, which really seems to be what we want. Any thoughts? Is this one of those 'not gonna happen' things? -Mark

Oliver Pereira wrote: It's quite possible I'm wrong on that point; I should've qualified it. It was a guess based on some previous discussion both here and on the village pump. The main problem I see with crediting individual authors is that it greatly dilutes credit. Someone could publish an encyclopedia that's 1/4 other content and 3/4 Wikipedia content, and as long as they credited five random authors for each article, they could publish it without ever mentioning Wikipedia, instead only mentioning "User:145.223.22.5" and "User:Saddam Hussein" and so on as authors. If they wished to purposely deny credit as much as possible, they could even go through and prefer to list IP addresses rather than user accounts where possible, since the GFDL lets them list any five authors of their choosing. -Mark

Alex R. wrote: It's too bad you're just joking. A really good publicity stunt requires this kind of chutzpah.. You don't mind people calling you nuts as long as they keep buying the product. It's very easy for some people to get carried away making up rules about every facet of life. Every time a cat writes a rule to make himself secure against some merely perceived problem, he gives the mice an opportunity to find creative ways for circumventing the rule. There are more mice than cats ... and far more cockroaches. Ec.

Brion Vibber wrote: The borrower could even invent 5 user names that best reflect his point of view; a [[User:Baby Killer]] would suggest a very specific POV about [[abortion]], or could you have faith in the student [[User:Learner Heisenberg]]'s credibility about the [[Uncertainty Principle]]? Ec

LittleDan wrote: That's hardly transparent for the GNU FDL. Even linking in a web page seems rather fishy to me. As an institution, /we/ really would prefer it; and as long as Wikipedia is up, it's ethically OK. But it probably violates the letter of the FDL (although IANAL). To see why this could be a problem, consider: If something ever happened to Wikipedia, we would no longer be giving credit to anybody. That's OK for own compliance with the License, since we're not publishing their work anymore either. But how is the visitor to another site to see the credit? As for writing down a URL, that's even worse. What if the reader has no access to the Internet? At least another web page can reasonably assume this. -- Toby

...therefore, we cannot be expected to list anon users. They know perfectly well that they cannot get credit as anons, or are complete newbies, and wouldn't know that credit exists (in that case, they soon will). I knew an anon user who made many great edits on a static IP. Even as an advanced user, he didn't make a username because he didn't <em>want</em> any credit for hist work. Eventually, he created a username, I think CrusadeOnIlliteracy or something like that, so that he could move pages and upload images. (On a related note, anons should be able to do those tasks.) He still didn't want to have credit. I think that there are many anons like that, and we don't need to give them credit because they don't want it. LDan __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com