On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 1:15 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)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?