[WikiEN-l] Re: group work, unattributed work

Sat Jul 12 07:04:42 UTC 2003

Oliver Pereira wrote in part:

>An author does not choose their IP address. In the vast majority of cases,
>they won't even know their IP address, or even what an IP address is! You
>cannot claim that an author is "choosing" to use a name if they don't even
>know what that name is.

True, the author licensed their work to the world completely anonymously,
so I have no obligation to list their authorship except otherwise.
That said, any author familiar with the practices of Wikipedia
has a reasonably expectation that they will be identified by their IP address,
so I believe that I really ought to identify them thus all the same.

>It is common in ordinary printed works for authors with names shared by
>other authors to be disambiguated in some way, for example by the use of
>middle initials. It is also common to have a paragraph of text about the
>author, saying who they are, possibly even explicitly telling people not
>to confuse them with another identically named person. Reasonable lengths
>are usually gone to to ensure that different authors are distinguished
>from each other.

It's up to the author to do this, not the deriver.
But again, authors familiar with Wikipedia practice
can reasonably expect a link to thier user page,
where they might place information of just this sort.
That's why I think that derivers should link to Wikipedia
rather than just copying down the author list.

-- Toby