2008/6/12 Titan Deng theodoranian@gmail.com:
Mmm... this may work. Finding five main authors is so tricky that we usually recommend a link to the wp history page, though - and a link to a blocked site is pretty useless in terms of actually giving attribution!
I think legally speaking it's not our responsibility to find ways for them to give attribution to the authors. It is not reasonable they use those articles and at the same time they need us to provide legal ways to them. Just too over.
I think if we want them to provide attribution, it is a good thing for us to try and make that process as easy and efficient for them as possible. With normal mirrors - ones that don't operate behind the Great Firewall - we have a pretty good record of getting attribution sorted out, because we can email them and say very clearly and simply what they need to do - and because it's painless, they can do it without it costing them anything.
If we demanded those mirrors do a lot of work, on the other hand, we'd get a much lower success rate.
The three obvious options for giving attribution:
a) Do what everyone else does, and link to the Wikipedia article histories. Except that's meaningless for most of the readers - the vast majority of them who live in mainland China won't be able to follow the link, and the GFDL probably frowns a bit on a list of authors which you aren't allowed to see...
b) Say "is taken from Wikipedia", or "copyright Wikipedia", without the link, but this is in violation of the GFDL, just in a different way.
c) Import full Wikipedia histories - thus giving attribution. However, this runs into problems in that it provides a vast amount of new material needing vetted, and so means a lot more editorial oversight is needed from Baidu. Probably expensive.
c) Figure out main authors for each and every article, and attribute them (without links?) in the Baidu articles. Aha, problem solved.
This last one is obviously the best option, but how would they get those main authors? Working them all out by hand is incredibly time-consuming when you have an even moderately long article, so for it to be practical we need some way of generating them en masse.
It's a thorny problem even for us, and you'd expect us to be the experts - we've tried before and never really found a method that's reliable. If we want Baidu to do something like this, we'd stand a much better chance if we can find some way of generating those authors for them in advance, or identify an easy method they can use to do so.*
If we just say "well, they can sort it out themselves, but they ought to do something", it strikes me that we're going to just make it less likely the problem ever gets fixed.