2013/10/23 Marco Chiesa <chiesa.marco(a)gmail.com>om>:
Actually, following the same philosophy, one should
wonder whether the
person reverting from version B to version C should be kept in the
contributor's list. At the end of the day, version C is an exact copy of
version A (i.e. no creative input of editor C), and version B is a
derivative version of version A, but versions C+1 and following are not
derivative versions of B, only of A and previous.
That was actually one of my arguments, yes. But I think this is more
on the moral side of things.
2013/10/23 Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com>om>:
No, the reverted text is derived from A, not from B.
That there has been a
version in between at the same place does not matter.
Doesn't it? The reverter might not even be aware that he's reverting
something (if, for instance, B was just random letter deletions and
the author of C thinks these are honest mistakes, he's clearly working
on version B)
Same argument in
different wording: None of the creativity that goes into the vandalizing
from version A to version B is present in version C. Thus, version C does
not fall under the copyright of the vandal. Which means that there is also
no obligation to honor their licensing restrictions, only those of the
authors who are actually partly responsible for the final document.
If we go this way, then none of the authors who added legitimate
content in the past but had it deleted later should be credited. We
would need a tool like "git blame" [1] to generate the author list.
Going further, say that someone with an offensive username (or even
just an username unaccepted on wikipedia, such as
a company name)
actually makes a valid edit, which is not reverted, but the name is
removed from the history. Is it fine to ignore the license just
because we find some usernames offensive? Shouldn't we instead credit
the user *at least* with a pseudonym?
Is it usual to remove names from history without replacing them with
another pseudonym? I know of no such case.
Is this even possible? I only have the rights to do this on ro.wp and
I see no option to replace the name with a pseudonym. I just select
"Delete the username or IP address" and add a reason and the history
shows the text "username deleted" crossed. And on the pdf export, I'm
positive there is no pseudonym used.
Strainu
[1]
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-blame.html