[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

Wed Oct 22 16:10:02 UTC 2008

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:30 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Just a few points:
> 1) there *isn't* really an accepted practice, which is why we're
> having this discussion.
>

Absolutely agreed.

2) For HWW, I think everything we used from Wikipedia would qualify
> under fair use anyway -- we quoted few pages verbatim or at length, so
> hopefully we're good for you and anyone else who disagrees on that
> score.
>

Well, my one statement was qualified with an "if", "if I made significant
contributions".  My other statement was regarding Eben Moglen, who you said
"felt that as long as our metric was consistent and we linked back to the
history on Wikipedia, citing all the authors of every article in our print
version was not necessary".  Maybe he made this comment knowing that the
amount quoted was insignificant, in which case I withdraw my statement.

But at the same time, "fair use" may be an excuse for copying, but it isn't
an excuse for lack of attribution.

3) For our book particularly -- if you can't get to a computer and
> type in a URL, it's a pretty useless piece of dead-tree anyway, since
> it's all about how to use Wikipedia online :P Of course that won't be
> true for article collection reprints.
>

I don't buy that as an excuse.

4)  When you say "significant contributions", that's the sticking
> point for me. What's significant? A first draft of an article that
> people then change completely? One paragraph? Two?

That's a grey area obviously, but I suggested maybe two paragraphs.

> What about adding
> paragraphs that are subsequently removed and are not present at the
> time of quoting the article? Adding some references? Any major edit?
> Repeated vandalism reversal over time?

Anything removed shouldn't count.  Adding references probably lacks the
creative expression necessary for copyright protection.

> It seems to me that this is
> such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
> various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
> all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
> type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
> you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
> significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
> some way.

Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
times.  But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly where
the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.

Try applying your excuse that it's all or nothing to a few other situations
and you'll see how ridiculous it is.  Should I drink myself into oblivion
because I can't quantify exactly how many beers is too many?