Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>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