On 20 Mar 2009, at 08:57, Tim Landscheidt wrote:
Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
The issue, from my point of view*, is that they
do "suddenly become
devoid of meaning" as soon as those links stop working. This can
happen for a number of reasons, including article moves, deletions,
and (<insert deity> forbid)
wikipedia.org going away. There are no
guarantees that I'm aware of that the links will continue to work for
even a decade, let alone the full length of copyright (and, given the
tendency to attribute authors even for PD works, afterwards).
On the other hand, a local copy of the author
list (normally) stays
accessible as long as the work does.
[...]
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.
If the shards of a coffee mug with a URL attribution
get
excavated 100 years in the future, I think a bit of research
on the part of the archaeologists can be asked for.
The whole discussion of coffee mugs is a red herring. That's most
likely using a quote from an article, which would fall under fair use
anyway and probably wouldn't (or shouldn't) need URL attribution. I'm
interested in the cases where a substantial part (or all) of the text
is used.
Wikipedia has many uses, and I don't think a one-size-fits-all
attribution-by-url works, technically nor logically (and possibly not
legally, given the debates going on at this mailing list). I'd much
rather see a sliding scale of attribution, based on how much of the
content you're wanting to reuse and the situation in which you're
reusing it. If you're printing a book with wikipedia content, then a
full author list is reasonable. If you're using a paragraph online,
then perhaps attribution-by-url is appropriate. If you're using a
sentence in a news article or on a coffee mug, then attributing
"Wikipedia" would probably be OK.
So long as the tools for the different levels of attribution exist
(the only two lacking are an easy and obvious way to get an author
list from wikipedia and a decent history URL), then why not set up a
page on wikipedia (et al.) which the community can edit (and debate),
defining the levels of attribution required?
Mike