[Foundation-l] Commons Usurp issue

Thu Jun 5 13:26:06 UTC 2008

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 7:12 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Definitely - even with real names, you can credit multiple people as
"John Smith" if they're all named John Smith - similarly, we can
credit multiple people as "PurpleMonkeyDishwasher" as a pseudonym.
Forcible renaming for their new contributions fails m:DICK, but is no
GFDL/CC-BY-SA problem.

>
> --
> geni
>
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