2008/10/25 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
I agree something needs to be done. Erik has already made a statement on the subject, so if you want to talk to someone at the foundation, he's probably the best choice. Alternatively, you could go straight to the top and talk to Sue, I've always found her most helpful and she'll pass you on to the appropriate person if necessary.
I agree that the current attribution level is insufficient. I think it's important to recognize that they are trying to follow the GFDL in doing something we all want, which is to bring educational content to people who would otherwise not be able to access it. It's equally important to recognize that even parsing the meaning of the GFDL in the context of Wikipedia is not a trivial task, and people have provided various interpretations.
For example, by a literal interpretation, if we consider the version history the "history section" that's referenced in the GFDL, any derivative would not only have to include author names, but everything that's currently recorded in the history section for each article, which in some cases can be much more information than the article itself. See the actual text of the GFDL:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
[begin quote] # I. Preserve the section Entitled "History", Preserve its Title, and add to it an item stating at least the title, year, new authors, and publisher of the Modified Version as given on the Title Page. If there is no section Entitled "History" in the Document, create one stating the title, year, authors, and publisher of the Document as given on its Title Page, then add an item describing the Modified Version as stated in the previous sentence. [end quote]
Attribution for articles with thousands of associated usernames is not trivial and potentially very burdensome. This is equally an issue for electronic versions as for print, as the size of the actual educational content that organizations like SOS children want to include already far exceeds the media on which they are able to transport it. Storing the entire version history of the article on [[France]] means transporting the full meta-information about 9317 changes.
The gentleman's agreement has always been that linking to the history as part of the attribution is the minimum needed to be compliant at least for online copies. Instead of direct links, for whatever reason, SOS Children has chosen to have a general comment amounting to "Go to Wikipedia for the article histories" both to each page & to the general copyright text. Now, stepping back for a minute: In terms of the likelihood of someone actually visiting the article histories to determine attribution, I'm not convinced that there's a world of difference between those two options, especially for an offline version. At the same time I agree that it's important to establish and stay within minimal baseline attribution & history standards.
I've emailed Andrew Cates and asked to do what's possible to transition the product (both website & DVD) to direct website references to the history for each article. There may be limited flexibility on their part for the existing DVD copies, but we can at least gradually try to move the project to an acceptable level of compliance.