2009/1/9 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
I don't know if these interpretations are correct or not. But I'd rather not chance it. Especially since if they're not correct, there's not much point in switching to CC-BY-SA in the first place.
You are completely free to oppose the switch because you find the license incomprehensible or difficult to understand. (We will, of course, try to answer all reasonable questions as to the meaning of the license, and I've invited CC to participate in this conversation.) However, the FDL 1.3 allows for precisely the kind of update we are proposing, and such a migration has been validated by the General Counsel of Creative Commons, Wikimedia, and the Free Software Foundation.
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 1) established practices on Wikipedia; 2) the ethics and spirit of the GNU Free Documentation License; 3) the ethics of the free culture movement; 4) the legal language of both licenses; 5) the experience of a human being contributing to Wikipedia.
On that latter point, a person making an edit will surely not fail to notice that their name does not actually appear _at all_ in any obvious location after they have done so. If anything, after making this update, we will attribute more clearly and consistently, and the same standards will apply to all. For example, I'm in favor of a software change to show the authors of an article, where there are less than six authors, in the footer of the article. The notion that this is a conspiracy theory to remove or reduce attribution comes from a deep misunderstanding of law, ethics, practices, and the human experience.