[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

Wed Oct 22 11:30:58 UTC 2008

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net>wrote:

> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> requirement.

For the title page, sure.  But the basic practice on Wikipedia is to list
the username of every single edit in the page history.

As for online sources, I think there are a lot of people upset about the
practices of these "subsequent distributors", but for the most part it's
just not worth it to sue them.  I suppose it'd be enlightening to send a
DMCA takedown notice to a few of the big names, but even that takes quite a
bit of effort, and for online sources it's fairly pointless.  I might have
done it myself by now, except that I changed my username to the generic
"Anthony", in part because for a lot of the articles I've contributed to I
actually would prefer *not* to be associated as an author.  Of course, I've
also largely stopped contributing.

For dead-tree distributors, this is mostly untested waters.  Personally I
would be extremely upset if I made significant contributions (say two
paragraphs or more) to a Wikipedia article which was copied into a book, and
I was not attributed in the book.  Printing a URL absolutely doesn't cut it,
in my opinion, when it comes to a printed book.  Pheobe and company may have
gotten advice from Eben Moglen saying that this was A-OK, but quite frankly
I think he was both ethically and legally wrong.  I don't think you can draw
any conclusions that this practice is an accepted one.  There just aren't
that many dead-tree distributors doing this.  As far as I know I haven't
made significant contributions to that book, though.  So that's someone
else's fight to fight.

I do feel like I need to speak up here, though, because the suggestion that
I have waived my right to attribution is an absolutely false one.