[Foundation-l] Commons Usurp issue

Wed Jun 4 23:12:35 UTC 2008

2008/6/4 Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist at gmail.com>:
> Thoughts:
>
> 1) If you're arguing about licenses, best to argue about CC-BY-SA 3.0,
> since it looks like that's what we're going to be switching to pretty
> soon.  The GFDL may not be relevant for very long.  (Although the
> switch is not, AFAIK, set in stone yet.)

I'll believe it when I see it.

CC-BY-SA 3.0 requires.  "The name of the Original Author (or
pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied"

So we are slightly stuck with using the pseudonym supplied.

> 2) It's not very nice to change people's pseudonyms without their
> permission.  On the other hand, in practice the pseudonym will
> hopefully be changed to something very similar (is there such a
> difference between "Bob" and "Bob 2"); and any conceivable way that
> anyone could contact the person would be updated to use the new name.
> Since the pseudonyms in question existed only on Wikimedia projects in
> the first place, changing them over on Wikimedia projects means that
> not much is lost, in practice.  In theory third parties might now use
> a different pseudonym, which could prove confusing, but in practice
> most third parties just link back to Wikimedia for the history anyway.

Actually the legally safest attack line would be to arrange it so the
names in the history stay the same but they link to different
accounts.

>
> 4) Last I heard, the deployment plan is indeed that eventually all
> conflicts are going to be forcibly resolved through some means,
> presumably with no consideration for local project policy.

That would be inadvisable.

-- 
geni