[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

Tue Oct 21 15:57:04 UTC 2008

Hoi,
I find it interesting to see how this thread is being weaved. If I read Erik
correctly, he is asking us what appropriate attribution is. He is asking any
and all observations. What I find is a thread about existing legalities.

When we observe the current practice, you find that people attribute by
referring to Wikipedia. This is an effective way of providing access to any
and all the people who have contributed to what has been used. When you read
the byzantine requirements under the different licenses, you have to be a
lawyer to understand them properly and there is no tooling to help you
define such things as "principal author" or the five most significant
authors.

If all we can do is discuss how things are currently legal, then we are not
looking for something that works practically. It is for practical reasons
that I wonder about the number of trees that have to be felled to attribute.
Certainly when you have a print of all the Wikipedia articles on the popes
of Rome and all the Christian saints and martyrs, you have a long list of
articles that may all need their own attribution. When you approach these
articles as a single work, you do no justice to the individual article and
its authors.

Really, why are we not talking about how this is to WORK for the people that
will use our data.. Please remember that this is what we do it for.
Thanks,
       GerardM

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.
>
> The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
> one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
> modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
> the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
> if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
> requirement."
>
> Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
> and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
> obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
> few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
> where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
> it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
> frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.
>
> The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
> compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
> article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
> publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
> letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
> includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.
>
> Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
> information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
> booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
> Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
> online uses?
>
> I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
> _license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
> username lists.
>
> My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
> "credits" URL for each article, something like
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/credits/World_War_II
>
> which would list authors and also provide full licensing information
> for all media files. If we had a specific collection of articles, the
> system could support this using collection IDs:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/collection_credits/Bertelsmann_One_Volume_Encyclopedia
>
> (These URLs are completely made up and have no basis in reality.)
>
> The advantage that I see of such an approach is that it would allow us
> to standardize and continually refine the way we display authorship
> information, and benefit the free sharing of content with a very
> lightweight process. The disadvantage (if it is perceived as such) is
> that if we would officially recommend such attribution in printed
> books, individual contributors would be less likely to see their
> username in print. But we might see more print uses because it would
> make the attribution more manageable.
>
> It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
> collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
> GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
> to the authorship information.)
>
> Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
> first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
> Thoughts?
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
>
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