On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 2:25 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/1/16 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
That is, you must at least reference Wikipedia and the article, but it
may
be appropriate to additionally *or* alternatively refer to individual contributor(s).
Yes - I agree with this. The only question would be whether referring to the history or to the article are substantially different in terms of attribution.
I don't think so - they are intrinsically linked like the cover of a book (where this stuff traditionally belongs), however it could be good to state the obvious ala:
"All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License. (See Copyrights for details *and History for contribut[ions|ors])."
It would also be possible (but not necessarily sensible) to list everyone, even for large contributor lists:
The following users have contributed to this article: X, Y, Z.
Finally, one could introduce a concept of article 'owners' or 'editors' similar to open source projects, though that would be a significant deviation from the status quo and would likely cause more problems than it would fix.
In community-developed guidelines regarding GFDL
re-use, both standards have existed; re-use recommendations in en.wp's Wikipedia:Copyrights refer to the article URL, for example.
That's fine for the Web but not so good elsewhere (like on t-shirts, articles, books, prints, etc.). Short URLs (ala http://tinyurl.com/) may help but better to avoid the problem altogether by being flexible. Brian's Bushism example before was a good one.
Let's broaden the question a bit:
Provided that,
- the site footer for articles is modified to name contributors if
there are fewer than six;
- the site footer also refers to the page history for credit -
Are there participants in this discussion who would consider attribution-by-history-URL for pages with > 5 authors acceptable, but who would consider attribution-by-article-URL unacceptable? I think if we lower the requirements in this regard, it needs to be based on more than a discussion here, but it would be good to get some informal feedback on the question first.
Another important point to consider (aside from the fact that it would require non-trivial changes and promote useless edits for 'credit whoring') is that we're often not talking about 'Photo by Sam Johnston' but rather having to credit the likes of:
- Fükenwulf - Bastard Soap - Justjihad - AnarcistPig - Cheesypoo
And these are just some of the ones that were recently *allowed* on review. Reality is that many (most?) Wikipedia usernames are not suitable for public consumption and are often disassociated from real identities anyway.
For a real life example, an ex-partner of mine recently referenced the cloud computing article in his blog, apparently without realising that I wrote it. I don't particularly care but apparently he does because the link is now nowhere to be found. There's a handful of people I wouldn't want to credit either for whatever reason (competitors in company documents for example) but that shouldn't preclude anyone from reusing Wikipedia content.
Sam