Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-)
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
I think it is useful to note that even in countries where moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of "originality" and "creative effort".
Just recently there was a question put to the Finnish "Mr. Intellectual Property law" (Jukka Kemppinen, who quite by the by, was one of the speakers at the seminar to mark 100 000 articles in the Finnish language wikipedia) on whether a text message could be considered to be sufficiently original to constitute a "work" as defined in the authors rights legislation. The situation was related to a tabloid publishing obscene text messages a government minister had sent to an exotic dancer.
According to Jukka Kemppinen, a simple two line obscene rhyming text message "Älä luota muihin, ota multa suihin." - giving a completely hypothetical example - would be quite sufficient to be a "work". (and no, I won't translate the message).
But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen