[WikiEN-l] Re: group work, unattributed work (was: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com)

Fri Jul 11 00:21:03 UTC 2003

koyaanis qatsi wrote:

>Not to be a wag, but how can we reconcile anonymous
>contributions of any stripe--including ones that
>aren't logged in--with the FDL?  Pick an AOL IP
>address and try to assign it to one author, without
>AOL's help.  Impossible.  It doesn't even trace to one
>*computer* without AOL jumping through hoops, much
>less to one author at that one computer.  (If this
>weren't the case, we wouldn't have the problem of
>recurring vandals).
>  
>
Well, I think the FDL only requires that you attribute the authors the 
same way they attributed themselves.  My concern here then wasn't that 
it'd require too much attribution, but too little: if right now 
Wikipedia's authors aren't attributed in a list of authors, the authors 
of derived works could reasonably argue that they don't have to make 
such an attribution either.  I think most of us would be happy with 
simply an attribution to "Wikipedia," but legally Wikipedia is not one 
of the authors, since the license explicitly says that you don't 
transfer copyright to Wikipedia when you post.  I think legally 
Wikipedia is just another user of your GFDL text -- exactly the same as 
anyone else who copies stuff from Wikipedia -- and so the other users 
are no more required to attribute anyone than Wikipedia itself is.

The only way I can think of to cleanly reconcile this with the FDL is to 
allow authors of derived works to credit "Wikipedia" in lieu of the 
actual authors and copyright holders -- that is, make an explicit 
exception to the GFDL's requirement of acknowledging 5 authors, and 
allow this one pseudo-author instead.  But that would require an actual 
license change, which at this point is probably infeasible.  We could do 
it informally (say "crediting Wikipedia is good enough for us"), but 
technically any individual Wikipedia contributor could still decline to 
give up their right to be individually credited, since it's not actually 
in the license, and Wikipedia has no legal claim to the content it hosts 
on its website (beyond being just another licensed user).  With online 
sources all this isn't so much an issue, since just a link back to the 
page resolves everything, but if anyone wants to print things in a book, 
the issue of whether they can credit 'from Wikipedia' or instead have to 
say "authored by Blah Blah, Person two, Person Three, etc." for each 
individual article might be a major one.

-Mark