[Foundation-l] Five main authors myth

Wed Dec 5 00:36:26 UTC 2007

On Dec 4, 2007 7:23 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 04/12/2007, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On Dec 4, 2007 6:53 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > As the WMF provides databases that do not contain the relevant metadata, I
> > > would certainly say that the WMF's actions amount to a de facto claim that
> > > article content can be distributed without history listings.  If that is not
> > > the WMF's intent, then they ought to at least make clearer to reusers that
> > > they will need more than just the articles dump and provide mirror sites
> > > with a way to obtain and use history information without loading every
> > > historical version of every article.  (Not least because there are no
> > > complete and working history dumps of the largest wikis).
> > >
> > FWIW, the stub-history dumps provide all the authorship information
> > needed to be GFDL compliant.  I agree with your sentiment, though.
>
> What sentiment are you agreeing with? His email is based on a false
> premise, it's meaningless.
>
What premise is false?  The WMF does provide database dumps that don't
contain the relevant author information.  They also provide database
dumps that do contain the relevant information, but they call the
dumps without the information "the archive most mirror sites will
probably want".  Thus they should (ethically, at least) make it
clearer to reusers that more information is required if they believe
this to be the case.