On 20 Mar 2009, at 08:57, Tim Landscheidt wrote:
Is this problem really exclusive to online
references? I'd
guess there is plenitude of author references to "[...] et
al." (or none at all) out there that cannot be resolved
without access to a catalog or the source material itself
and become "devoid of meaning" at the latest when these re-
sources are destroyed or not accessible.
I'm not talking about references to a text, I'm talking about a copy
of the text. That's completely different. Please, give me examples of
where text is reprinted with the authors attributed as "[...] et al."
or none at all.
A copy of Wikipedia text is frequently used in eBay descriptions of
books. The attribution is simply to Wikipedia, and does not progress so
far as to say "[...] et al." That's about as much as anyone could
reasonably expect, no matter what the licence says.
Only my own laziness and the economics of publishing prevent me from
putting together a book of related Wikipedia articles. (Maybe a
wiki-guide to Vancouver in time for the upcoming Olympics.) If I did I
could do so safely in the knowledge that no-one would sue me. For any
author to expect otherwise is to suffer (to use Milos's appropriate
term) from "bourgeois egotism."
Ec