2008/10/25 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
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