[Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>wrote:

> On Wednesday 21 January 2009 03:23:51 Erik Moeller wrote:
> > 2009/1/20 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> > > 1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the
> > > page.
> >
> > CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model
> > is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use
> > attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i)
> > and 4(c)(iii).
>
> Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to
> say
> that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a
> Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same. And as a
> programmer, I do not see why is this controversy necessary at all, as a
> number of people have presented a variety of solutions that make it
> possible
> to analyse the revisions and extract authors with satisfying accuracy.
>


I disagree.  The technical analysis misses contributions which remain in
conceptual form (layout of a page, sections completely rewritten but not
reconceptualized).  It also is error prone.  Original authorship of text
returned to an article by later editors after it's deleted by an
intermediate editor is often hard to properly automatically trace, as it can
require n-way compares with n large.

There's nothing wrong with this method of attribution - it's better than we
have or require now.  It's less than what GFDL says it requires, sure, but
Wikipedia has never held to the letter of that, and anyone who's contributed
to Wikipedia once they were aware of that can be held to have implicitly
waived that particular GFDL clause in favor of "what we're actually doing".

This improves what we actually do.  Why would you think it's worse?


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com