[Wikipedia-l] List of contributors and GFDL

Thu Apr 29 19:13:52 UTC 2004

I was just made aware of this thread, and I realise
that potentially a legal issue is discussed on
wikitech. I would like the opinion of our lawyers on
this specific point. 

So, tel me if I understand well, to comply with the
gfdl the best we can  (and we already know it is
problematic), what you suggest is to list first the
real name contributors, followed by pseudonymes, then
by ips. Of course, the number of names is limited. We
can expect that on many articles, the number of names
will be over 50 or more. 

I understood the gfdl "normal" requirement is to list
the 5 main contributors. We probably know that we can
define who the 5 main contributors are. Indeed, unless
the number of contributors is below 5, there is no way
to report with honesty the legal requirements.

This said, if we can't report reality, why would we
report a group of contributors more than another ? If
a pseudonyme wrote 95% of an article, and 5%
officially real names corrected typos, is that really
correct to indicate these 5 real names and not the
pseudonyme ?

I would say it is not. Legally, that is incorrect.
>From a community view point, that is setting a case
which I am not sure is really positive.
It think that it would be more correct to make random
choice among pseudo or real names, or to choose among
the last ones. 

I will forward this to wikipedia-l and foundation-l,
since I believe this is more than a technical issue.  

Evan Prodromou a écrit:
> So, I'd like to add a little block of attribution
data to each page
> (optional, per-installation; I'm guessing Wikipedia
wouldn't use
> this). Something along the lines of:
> 
>        This article last edited on April 21, 2004 by
Evan Prodromou.
>        Based on work by Alice Notaperson, Bob
Alsonotaperson, users
>        Crankshaft, Deckchair and Eggplant, and
anonymous editors.
> 
> For each (distinct) person who's listed in the old
table, it'd show
> their real name if it's set, or their user name if
not. All anonymous
> edits would be lumped under "anonymous editors".
Contributors would be
> listed with real-named folks first, then pseudo'd
folks, then
> anonymous. There's no particular reason for that; it
could be any
> other way (although I don't see a big point making
it configurable).
> 
> The goal here is to make it easy for redistributors
to comply with
> license provisions that require author attribution
(such as some
> Creative Commons licenses), without having to dig
through a whole
> bunch of history pages.
> 
> Anyhoo, the Metadata.php code already does most of
this logic, albeit
> for output in RDF format. I'd like to take that
stuff and put it in
> the Article class, in a method like
"getContributors". The method
> could then be used both from the attribution code
and from the RDF
> metadata code.
> 
> getContributors would return an array of arrays,
each of which would
> contain:
> 
>         0. User ID
>         1. User account name
>         2. User real name, if set
> 
> Another option would be to create User objects for
each entry in the
> returned array, but a) I don't think that most of
the User object
> fields (email, preferences) are needed, and b) I'd
be worried about
> slingin' around incomplete User objects. So, I think
the arrays are
> the best bet.
> 
> Does returning an array of arrays seem insane? Would
it be wrong to
> add this method to Article? If so, where else would
it go?
> 
> ~ESP
> 

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