Evan Prodromou wrote:
>>>>"DM" == Daniel Mayer <maveric149(a)yahoo.com> writes:
>>>>
>>>>
DM> ??? OK, what about the author requirement? The only
DM> alternative is for them to list 5 authors of every article.
So, I guess I'm a little confused. Is there some kind of stipulation
that download publishers don't have to credit contributors as long as
they credit Wikipedia?
As far as I can tell, this is informal policy, but I have no idea where
it stands legally. Since technically we license under the GFDL, with no
additional caveats, it's quite possible a contributor could refuse to
recognize crediting Wikipedia as sufficient, and instead demand that
they personally be credited (if they are the only or one of five or
fewer authors). So our policy seems to be more of an "if you do this,
we, as Wikipedia, won't hassle you, but we can't guarantee that
individuals won't hassle you". There is a possible argument that
"Wikipedia" is the author itself of a collaborative work, which would be
a more satisfactory solution, but would not work for GFDL's text that
was originally published elsewhere and then appropriated by Wikipedia.
In any case, this discussion has gone around in circles a few times
before both here and on wikilegal, and I'm not sure anything was
resolved really. I'd personally try to avoid being legalistic about the
whole thing, and ask people to credit us, rather than demand they credit
us as a legal matter, since if we delve too deeply into the
technicalities of our licensing, it's quite possible all sorts of things
will start to fall apart.
-Mark