2009/1/10 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
The proposed attribution (crediting authors where it is reasonably possible and linking to the version history where that would be onerous) is completely consistent with
- established practices on Wikipedia;
- the ethics and spirit of the GNU Free Documentation License;
- the ethics of the free culture movement;
- the legal language of both licenses;
- the experience of a human being contributing to Wikipedia.
As I said, if that's true, there's no reason to switch. Compatibility can be achieved by allowing CC-BY-SA to be relicensed under the GFDL.
No, that does not follow. The fact that a license developed for software manuals is not particularly well-suited for radically open online collaboration was discovered early by stakeholders in said license. That doesn't make it an unethical or poorly written license; it simply makes it the wrong tool for the job.
That said, I think "if it's too hard to credit people, then you don't have to do it" is a ridiculous interpretation of the GFDL.
Except that it is not the actual interpretation that anyone is proposing. What is proposed is to provide a reference to a list of names where that list is very long. Considering that many if not most usernames only become meaningful when resolved to user page URLs, pointing people to the history is in fact arguably more useful than e.g. simply stating that Dogmaster3000 was one of 50 usernames contributing to an article, and not more onerous for anyone seeking to determine the meaning of the attribution.
That is not to say that this method of attribution cannot be improved; it can. It's been proposed by various people to track attribution data on a separate page from the version history. Ideally, such attribution data could be provided for a specific version of a page. This could be complemented with brief profile information ("John Doe, an anthropologist from Houston, Texas") to better serve the purpose of giving credit. Moreover, in the cases where there are few authors, algorithms can be continually improved to exclude vandals and other edits with no copyrightable value.
Ultimately, the outcome of a consistent principle of attribution-by-URL under certain circumstances is more attribution, not less, as people can come into compliance more easily.
What I see the WMF doing is: 1) changing the license to fit their practices, rather than changing their practices to fit the license;
I would change "their" to "our", but otherwise I agree with this statement. Bringing rules in compliance with practices when this is consistent with a widely shared understanding of the public interest is precisely one of the principles of any social reform; enforcing rules against such a shared understanding is precisely an example of questionable social coercion.
- encouraging others to
distribute the content without attributing the vast majority of the authors.
Here you are again deliberately misrepresenting the actual proposed standards of attribution.