[Foundation-l] GFDL Q&A update and question

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 3:35 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Wikipedia" would only satisfy the license if the author specifically
>> said that was ok. The FAQ says there will not be a requirement to
>> designate "Wikipedia" or anything else to receive the attribution. I
>> would expect the attribution requirements to be made perfectly clear
>> before we vote, if they're not, I would almost certainly vote against
>> the proposal.
>
> I concur.  The WMF should clearly state what they anticipate
> attribution to look like.  Whether one agrees that the WMF position is
> adequate might end up being an important issue in the decision on
> whether to support the vote.  However the absence of any guidance
> about what is appropriate attribution strikes me as a strong reason to
> be critical.
>
> If attribution rules are going to change, I think it is important to
> be as unambiguous as possible about what they are changing to, and
> encourage a uniform interpretation rather than leaving it for every
> user to ponder what the license expects of them.

Agreed. It might not be possible to provide completely unambiguous
rules, given this is free content we're talking about :P  -- but at
the very least it would be extremely helpful, from a practical sense,
for the WMF to provide clear guidelines for attribution under a wide
variety of circumstances: reprinting an article on a website, in a
book, using a photo, etc. etc. Heck, even if the license doesn't
change, it would be super useful to write up such guidelines and make
them widely available. AFAIK the document that directly addresses this
question on en: was primarily written by a non-lawyer, many years ago,
and it could probably use some help.

As for voting, I think both would be useful -- a straw poll on meta
for discussion, but boardvote for actual taking and counting of the
votes, since this a community-wide issue.

-- phoebe