2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
If we assert a default "sense of the community" that the URL is reasonable, and allow individual authors to override that (and consequently annoy readers and redistributors in the future) how does that negatively affect any author's rights or property?
Either it's reasonable, or it's not. If you feel the need to give people the option of opting out, then obviously you think it isn't reasonable. Also, why should people that have edited in the past and then moved on not get the same rights as current editors?
Essentially, by doing this, you'd be saying: "We disagree with you, but we're not interested in engaging in a prolonged battle over perceived author rights in a massively collaborative work with you. So if you really have a beef with our attribution model, which is the result of many months of deliberation and consultation, you can use this setting to be attributed in a way for your past edits that's consistent with your perception and beliefs about what rights you have retained under the terms of use in the past. "
"However, we think that the notion that print-outs of massively collaborative works should carry author attribution over multiple pages, that spoken versions should contain many seconds of text-to-speech generated author lists, that indeed any re-user will have to worry about this problem, is completely counter to the principles of free culture. So, for your past edits, please click this button. We will always attribute you by name as long as we use your text, and we will probably remove your edits over time. For your future edits, we've made it abundantly clear that this isn't something we believe is required or needed. If you think it is, please contribute somewhere else."
It would be, IMO, a completely defensible way to deal with a situation where a minority is trying to impose standards on an entire community which are counter to its objectives. I'm not necessarily saying that this reflects the situation we have today: I don't know how widespread the belief in the need for distribution of excessive author metadata is. I think it would be worth the effort to find out. It's my personal belief that such metadata requirements are harmful examples of non-free licensing terms, and I would be surprised to see many people defend excessive attribution as in the http://books.google.com/books?id=BaWKVqiUH-4C&pg=PT979#PPT959,M1 example (even if it's aesthetically well done and obviously pleasing to lots of German mothers).
The above solution would still result in the odd situation where the article on [[France]] would say: 'See (url) for a list of authors, including Foo and Bar'. But that is a problem that could be solved over time by removing those people's contributions. It seems to me that, essentially, some people have been operating under the assumption that they are contributing in a fashion that would make the resulting work effectively non-free in much the same way other onerous restrictions do. It's too bad that they've made that assumption, given how strongly and clearly we've always emphasized the principles of freedom.
I think it would be fully ethically and legally defensible to ignore this assumption as incorrect and unreasonable, but it would be nicer (and possibly less noisy) to accommodate these people as much as reasonably possible while explaining that the 'free' in 'free encyclopedia' is inconsistent with hassling re-users about the inclusion of kilobytes worth of largely meaningless author metadata. I'm not advocating one path over another at this point, though.
Flexible and vague clauses can work well when you're dealing with issues with few stakeholders who all have a shared and tacit understanding of what they want to accomplish. By definition, massive collaboration isn't such a situation: any one of hundreds or thousands of contributors to a document can behave unreasonably, interpreting rules to the detriment of others. The distributed ownership of copyright to a single work is an example of what Michael Heller calls 'gridlock' or an 'anticommons'. Ironically, even with free content licenses, the gridlock effects of copyright can still come into play.
I believe it's our obligation to give our reusers protection from being hassled by people insisting on heavy attribution requirements, and to create consistency in reuse guidelines. Really, WMF and its chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we can't give clarity on what's required of them. A great deal of free information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is free to be reused without onerous restrictions.