[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 12:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
> software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
> page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
> likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
> topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
> specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
> migration to CC-BY-SA.

<snip>

I thought about this a fair amount when putting together "How
Wikipedia Works." We opted there for using the first five authors as
determined by this script:
http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl
precisely to avoid the pages-of-tiny-print problem (though there is a
certain satisfaction in seeing one's own name in print even if you
only copyedited an article once.) (see our full credits at:
http://howwikipediaworks.com/ape.html).

Of course, first-five doesn't solve much of anything in terms of true
attribution; there were certain cases where I knew those names were
people who had primarily reverted vandalism rather than the people who
had come up with the bulk of the ideas in the text (this is especially
true for policies, which often started with sweeping essays written by
an individual who was bringing together thoughts and practice back in
2003 or 2004). In a few important cases, the early history is lost to
the ages (and disk failure), and it's only through anecdote and
deduction that you'll figure out how, say, Larry Sanger contributed to
NPOV. I stuck to this algorithm anyway for the sake of consistency,
however. I think in practice, however, listing individual authors of
any particular article, whether you list only a few or all of them,
invariably overvalues some people's contributions, undervalues others,
and totally ignores anonymous contribs, and also doesn't do much for
preserving everyone's copyright claims since so many people are
completely pseudonymous.

So, stepping away from what the GFDL & CC currently specify, I think
that moving to a corporate model of citing authors makes sense. When
you contribute to Wikipedia, you're contributing to specific, discrete
pages. So what about using a page-level model citation like:

Credit: Contributors to "Foobar article." From Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia. Accessed July 17, 2012. permanent URL here. List of
contributors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar/history.

And using either a perma-link to the history that's tied to the date
of the perma-link used, or some other kind of stable history/credits
link like Erik proposes? We keep this data and intend to keep it for
the future, presumably, so offering up a link to it seems reasonable
as long as the page-site combination is adequately referenced.

-- Phoebe