On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I think the percentages given as plausible, but do we really have 10 million contributors? The English Wikipedia apparently has 9,237,657 registered users, but I believe a very large proportion of them have never made an edit, an even larger proportion won't have any edits which still exist in articles. I find it very unlikely that there are 10 million contributors, even across all Wikimedia projects, that have copyrightable contributions. (Of course, I'm ignoring anons - I don't see how they can realistically sue for copyright infringement.) So I think the expected number of problematic cases is significantly less than 1, but it certainly isn't 0.
We'll have. If you start with just 100.000 contributors and raise percentage to 10% (which may be reasonable too), you'll end with 100 cases.
But, it is reasonable to suppose that Mike's legal predictions are more relevant than mine :) So, legal part is no issue anymore for me.
The only issue which stays is related to users which declare that they want to be attributed: Would we allow that? If yes, is there any plan ("yes" is good answer enough) how to deal with making attribution recommendations useless? If no, is it possible it legally?