[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

Mon Oct 20 22:07:57 UTC 2008

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to?

Wikipedia articles seldom have more than a few authors. Many even more
than a single copyright bearing author of the page text (plus a few
additional authors for illustrations).

Collections obviously have more authors in total, but I don't think
the situation is very different from a traditional dead tree
encyclopaedia, which typically has one or a few authors per article
and a great many authors in total in total.

One difference is that traditional encyclopaedias usually compensate
their authors financially while authors on Wikipedia receive only
positive Karma from furthering the social mission and the reputational
boost that comes from their good work having tractable attribution
that links their work back to them.

My long standing recommendation for free content licensing in the
context of collaborative works is well embodied in this
recommendation:

http://meta.wikimedia.oro/wiki/GFDL_suggestions#Proposed_attribution_text

What shouldn't be done is create rules which gives special privileged
to some parties for virtue of running a website (remember, websites
are not communities. The community may entirely leave and they should
not have to attribute their initial webhost for all eternity), and
failing to ensuring that there is a way to trace creations back to
their creators.