[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Attribution and Relicensing

[Sam Johnston]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

> What about text works which were licensed under CC-BY-SA but were released
> somewhere other than Wikipedia?  Can these be incorporated into Wikipedia?
> How will their right to attribution be respected?  Is this allowance of
> "reference by history URL" built in to CC-BY-SA, or is it specific to
> Wikipedia?
>

The CC licenses give us a fair bit of room to move with regards to
attribution, allowing for pseudonums, taking into account the medium,
delegates (incl. publishing entities eg Wikipedia), etc.

I also stumbled on this[1] in commons which is interesting in the context of
the discussion about certain types of contribution (photographs)
inexplicably requiring stronger attribution:

"Visible tags or
watermarks<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking>inside
images are strongly discouraged at Wikimedia Commons. So information
like "Mr. Foobar, May 2005, CC-BY-SA" shall not be written directly in the
image but in EXIF fields, which is technically even superior. The reasons
are:

   - We don't tag our Wikipedia articles with our names in a prominent way
   inside the article text *in order to step behind the work and let it speak
   for itself*, the same applies to the images (stepping behind own work and
   thus reducing personal vanity is crucial for
neutrality<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPOV>
   )."

Cheers,

Sam

1.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Manipulating_meta_data#Purpose_for_using_EXIF_at_Commons