On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 5:59 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/8 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
I concur. The WMF should clearly state what they anticipate attribution to look like. Whether one agrees that the WMF position is adequate might end up being an important issue in the decision on whether to support the vote. However the absence of any guidance about what is appropriate attribution strikes me as a strong reason to be critical.
Not really. Firstly the WMF is in no position to provide such advice. It is not a significant copyright holder and it doesn't write the license. Major wikipedia authors and CC are in a far better position.
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As a major organization with legal council, the WMF is in a much better position to understand what the license requires than most reusers. 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.
I'm looking for guidance of the sort: Doing X, Y, and Z, is generally sufficient to comply with CC-BY-SA. 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.
It is not sensible to have a proposal that WMF wants to relicense everything CC-BY-SA and then also say that the WMF is in no position to say what that means for the reuse of Wikipedia content.
-Robert Rohde