2009/1/9 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
As a major organization with legal council, the WMF is in a much better position to understand what the license requires than most reusers.
The law however doesn't care how easy licenses are for reusers to understand. The WMF cannot provide legal advice and in that case finding out what authors view as acceptable may well be more worthwhile than legally meaningless advice.
Yes, we could ask major Wikipedia authors what they "want" when Wikipedia content is reused, but that is not necessarily the same as asking what the license requires and is certainly impractical at the large scale.
Not really. You don't have to ask everyone just a reasonable sample and you build it up over time.
So you would have say the page on 45s
==Authors views==
*Credit written on the centre of the record -author1 *Credit written on the center of the record -author2 *Credit spoken aloud at the start of the record -author3 *Credit written on the center of the record -author4
==Resuers views==
*Credit written on record sleeve -reuser1 *Credit written on the centre of the record -reuser2
==what people have actually done==
*Credit spoken at end of song (because they took the vorbis files and transfered them straight to the 45) <ref>source</ref>
==Caselaw==
*none found
So at a glance you can tell what most authors think it should be and we can spot disagreements and see what can be done to deal with them.
I'm looking for guidance of the sort: Doing X, Y, and Z, is generally sufficient to comply with CC-BY-SA.
Assuming you are in the united states your medium is X and the credits don't contain any born secret information.
It need not be minimally sufficient, and probably shouldn't be, since any advice we give ought to be at a level that is clearly black and white, and not gray. Maybe we necessarily limit that advice to text and certain traditional print mediums, but I do think there needs to be something direct about acceptable standards for attribution.
One of the standard cases for the GFDL being flawed is that it is impossible to use GFDL images on postcards but if you want to ignore that case.....