On 29/10/2007, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
Andrew Gray schreef:
I think the fact that we *ourselves* make a point of being discreet about attribution makes it more reasonable for us to go with #1 - as a photographer, I would feel short-changed if the authors were prominently credited but I wasn't, whilst I wouldn't feel offended at being relegated to the small print on p.350 if the authors themselves were in the small print on p.348.
Does that latter distinction make sense?
Not really, 99% of our text is written by Wikipedians, who have no expectation to be prominently attributed; we have taken many of our best pictures from outsiders, many of whom expect more prominent credit to be given.
For what it's worth, that was from the point of view of me-as-an-outsider, not me-as-a-contributor, seeing someone reuse my material. I would feel silly to find that I was assumed to need a higher degree of attribution than the main author, and I can't believe I'm abnormally self-effacing.
They don't care about, and haven't ever explicitly agreed to Wikipedia's internal rules on attribution.
If we require people to care about and explicitly (implicitly?) agree to Wikipedia's practices on attribution (which are, after all, liable to change over time), one wonders why we allow the incorporation of free licensed material at all, or what the point of these licenses in the first place was!
I'm not saying that I don't care what the photographers think, but I don't think we're being unreasonable here.
This isn't an "and attribute me prominently in the following way" license, it's an "and attribute me" license. We can go too far in disrupting the way *our* project works in order to accomodate the hypothetical views of a "silent minority" of contributors - all of whom have chosen to release material under a copyleft license that does allow what we're doing.