Alex R. wrote:
The GFDL requires that the last five authors of a
document released be
listed
(see section 4(B) of the license). Thus, five contributors to a page may
technically have to be listed by any GFDL republisher of that page.
Imagine someone who wants to publish a page and finds that one of the
authors has an offensive name; they may decide that they cannot morally
accept to use such a page because of the offensive character of the author's
name which they must acknowledge.
If there is an offense username, a controversial name, or one which
involves
profanity, then this would tend to discourage the redistribution of
Wikipedia
content. Thus IMHO using an offensive user name is in violation of the
spirit of the licensing scheme that we use in order to encourage
redistribution
of our work. That should be enough reason to prohibit the use of such
names.
This brings up an interesting point, especially if Wikipedia is going to
ever be published in paper. With online publishing, a link to the page
history should suffice for attribution, but in a paper format the
publisher would actually have to list five authors for every single
article, and they certainly wouldn't want to list offensive names for
those authors.
I think this whole thing is unfortunate though, and it's becoming
increasingly clear that the GFDL exactly as written isn't *really* what
we want to do. I think most Wikipedians would be happier with a license
that required Wikipedia to be credited rather than five authors. As it
stands now, the republisher *has* to credit five authors, but does *not*
have to credit Wikipedia at all. They could give it their own name and
not mention its connection to us at all, as long as they list the
authors properly. I think most of us would prefer the opposite -- that
they be required to credit Wikipedia, and not be required to credit the
individual authors. But this would require a license change, which may
be impossible at this point.
-Mark