[WikiEN-l] Re: group work, unattributed work (was: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com)

Fri Jul 11 21:40:00 UTC 2003

Oliver Pereira wrote:
> 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.

If that's true, then we're free to identify them as 'anonymous',
right?  Or to identify them by the number that we have for them.

There's *nothing* that can give us a moral duty to try to found out
the real name of a contributor, if they don't give it to us.  If they
don't give us a name, we are perfectly free to identify them by
whatever we *do* have.

> 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. 

No, that's not what I'm claiming at all, and the absurd conclusion
that you cite does not follow from what I'm claiming.

What I'm asserting is that the GFDL requires us to identify up to 5
authors.  This requirement can only mean that we are required to
identify them using whatever information they gave us.  If they didn't
give us information, then we should identify them as best we can.

> (1) The name of the author, even if it is a pseudonym, should be agreed by
> that author.

And that's exactly what I'm arguing for.  If someone contributes
anonymously, by not logging in, then we identify them as best we can.

> (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".)

For example, we can use what little identifying traces they did leave
us, i.e. their ip number.

> Even if it is agreed that pseudonyms are acceptable, it is still true that
> the current system doesn't even require *them*.

No, it does require them.  Every contribution is identified in a
particular way.

This is a pretty silly argument, I think.  What are we concerned
about, exactly?  Do you think someone could plausibly contribute an
anonymous edit and then get mad at us later because we didn't do the
impossible, i.e. we didn't hunt them down and find out their real name
or get permission to identify them as best we could?

That's absurd, I think.  We don't need to worry about it, and the FDL
in no way requires such nonsense.

--Jimbo