[WikiEN-l] Re: Use of Wikipedia articles at Malaspina.com

Fri Jul 11 00:37:48 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote in part:

>The only further requirement is that they list all authors of their
>modifications (e.g. list themselves), and list the names of five authors
>of the original version (or all the authors if fewer than five).

Only 5?  Very well.  Probably still easier to link to us, however.

>Contact information is not required, just the names (presumably if the
>authors originally published under a pseudonym/username, that name would
>suffice as well).

What I'm worried about is that if, say, mav submits an edit,
then we not only log this under the name "Maveric149"
but also link to mav's user page, which lists his real name.
Can mav reasonably expect, then, to receive credit
as "Daniel Meyer", a name that perhaps he uses professionally?
("contact info" was too broad a term to use.)

>This is a bit vague though -- it seems to indicate
>that essentially all they have to do is preserve the credit in the
>author list of the original document: but Wikipedia documents do not
>have an author list.  One can be inferred by looking at the page
>history, but there is no explicit list anywhere of "these are the
>authors of this document."

I'd argue that standard practice on a wiki
is that if you want to know who edited a particular page,
then you look at the page history.
Understanding that, derivers must look there.

>They don't even have to say "from Wikipedia,"
>as Wikipedia does not own any of the relevant copyrights.

I'll agree with this.

-- Toby