[Foundation-l] How I should consider GFDL in shared content?

Mon Aug 28 16:48:08 UTC 2006

On 8/28/06, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
[snip]
> I will have to agree with the parent poster that this is one aspect of
> the GFDL that is often strongly ignored, and that citation of
> authors/contributors needs to significantly improve over what is
> currently being done on most Wikimedia projects.
>
> I'll refrain from rehashing further points on this issue I've made in
> the past, but it is a problem.

It's also worth noting that most articles have been edited by a very
small number of users... and it is also true that many edits are not
significant enough to gain a copyright interest.... and it's also true
that a lot of users have little to no interest in attribution (claim
supported by the number of anon edits made).

So the end result is that we have these history pages which are often
short, but sometimes very long,  filled with people who are not
authors, and whom often have no interested in attribution.

With the new dynamic namespace support expected to be completed fairly
soon, it should be possible to have multiple associated namespaces ...
for example multiple article talk namespaces.

Perhaps it's time we consider adding an article credits namespace...
If you wrote a significant portion of an article, and desire
attribution, you must add yourself to the credits page.  Standard
wiki-based review would keep people honest.

This would greatly ease license conformance, and it would give us a
place to put historical attribution data (such as histories from
merged pages, and attribution for text sourced from other free
sources) which is currently handled in a number of failure prone ways.