[WikiEN-l] Confirmations of permission

Thu Sep 1 03:12:48 UTC 2005

On Wed, 2005-08-31 at 17:11 +0100, Nick Boalch wrote:
> Theresa Knott wrote:
> >> What is the prevailing etiquette on what to do with positive responses
> >> to requests for confirmation of licensing permission?
> >
> > I think as long as you remove the IP, the email address and other
> > sensitive info, I doubt that  anyone would object to the email being
> > copied to the talk page would they?
> 
> No, I can't imagine they would -- but if this sensitive info is removed 
> then there's essentially no difference between an emailed authorisation 
> and a random anonymous editor on the talk page claiming to be the 
> author. Is my word that the confirmation was real enough?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> N.
> 

The way I've seen some editors handle this is promise to forward the
e-mail to anyone who requests a copy. Of course, this doesn't really
resolve the verifiability problem, because headers can be easily
spoofed. One suggestion I have is to ask the copyright holder to create
a PGP key set and sign the e-mail with his or her private key, as I and
some others on this list do with all our e-mails. As long as his or her
public key is available, which it always will be if placed on a public
key server and downloaded by individuals, the e-mail can be easily
verified. GnuPG, a PGP program, is freely available for all major
operating systems, and many mail clients, such as Evolution and Mozilla
Thunderbird, provide easy PGP integration.

--Christopher Larberg ([[w:en:User:Slowking Man]])
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikien-l/attachments/20050831/46bbf3e7/attachment.pgp 