On 8/24/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote: [snip for reordering]
I've suggested several in the past that we provide a more obvious attributions link, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/example
This looks good, I like it.
Well then. :) If we agree, lets move forward! :)
[snip] Some nitpicking with the rest of your message. :)
Most of our text is written by wikipedians. They do not expect attribution. Text that is imported from other sources should be attributed. (EB1911, MathWorld, etc.)
They most certainly do expect attribution. I do. Many other people do. We've had angry complaints from people where we've screwed it up. And we've had people specifically demand better attribution for text authors, including a speaker at WM2006 as I recall.
Attribution It's required by the license. We provide it via a click to the history page.
Photographers outside of Wikipedia also expect attribution.
So do photographers who contribute directly.
Shall I forward your message to commons so that a bunch of photographers can mob you? :)
This is no problem: we don't have to add attributions to Wikipedia users, only to external sources.
This isn't true. In fact, providing inconsistent attribution can give us substantial licensing problems. What we do now can easily be argued as both customary and reasonable to our medium and means of distribution. If we start breaking it up we make a mess out of it.
Not to mention that it would just be rude to provide better attribution for people who may not even know we exist over the people who slave over the site day after day.