On 7/18/07, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote: I felt it was necessary, because a hypothetical situation similar to a real situation is by definition not the real situation. Therefore, you never get as precise an answer. Exactly - there would be no purpose for linking to a history section which no longer exists. This implies that the history of a deleted article needs to be preserved and be publically available. Its a fuzzy spot. I doubt the FDL was really designed with a project as large as the WP in mind so some of the concepts that might be easy to implement with book-sized works run into real problems when brought to such a large scale.

On 18/07/07, Angela Anuszewski <psu256(a)member.fsf.org> wrote: There's nothing fuzzy about it - it's common sense, legally required, and what's morally right. Content on Wikipedia should be attributed to the creator/copyright holder (who has licensed their contribution for free use under GFDL); this is achieved through the history page. So, *all* history of the content (i.e. including from merges) has to be publically available. Content on Wikipedia is "free" but it's not stolen. Zoney -- ~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...

On 7/18/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Or a history merge, or a talk page copy of the history.. So yea, thats consistent with our current approved practices.

On 19/07/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: It really doesn't seem essential for the GFDL, now I think about it. We're tracing the authors of *a document*, not of individual words and sentences. The article's a collective work, a work by many people, not an aggregation of a hundred or a thousand tiny seperate works. If we had no history section at all, just a little script somewhere that added your name to a list of "this page's authors" whenever you edited an article, we'd be fine. For editorial purposes, being able to see the details of the history is really handy. For license purposes? It's icing on the cake. We have a list of contributors to each article - the list on the history file. We dump that onto the talk page as a plain text list. If we can look down that list of names and say "these sixteen names are there" we can easily turn it into "the document, as of this moment, is a collaborative work by these sixteen people", and we're done. Your authors are named; attribution is done and dusted. All we need to be able to say is "the following people worked on this document". There are some false positives - people whose edits were quickly reverted and made no contribution to the article, say - but they show up in the history anyway, and I guess you could argue that they were in some conceptual way fellow workers on the document! ... There are, of course, downsides to dumping the history; it removes the ability to do in-depth analysis to figure out who the "real authors" were. But this is less of a loss than it seems, because this is an astonishingly impractical sort of analysis to do - you can winnow out the obvious not-involved-in-the-work cases, the vandalism-revert pairs, but after that it gets very hard to computerise and awfully easy to miss out real, significant, contributors - lots of false negatives. Once there's been any kind of complex back-and-forth, simply running an automated tool for "biggest contributors" is going to get some pretty inaccurate results in any meaningful sense. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk