2009/1/16 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
That is, you must at least reference Wikipedia and the article, but it may be appropriate to additionally *or* alternatively refer to individual contributor(s).
Yes - I agree with this. The only question would be whether referring to the history or to the article are substantially different in terms of attribution. In community-developed guidelines regarding GFDL re-use, both standards have existed; re-use recommendations in en.wp's Wikipedia:Copyrights refer to the article URL, for example. The current recommendations are intended to be based on a lowest common denominator among WMF- and community-developed interpretations of reasonable GFDL attribution obligations for re-users, to ensure that the licensing regime we may implement in the future is consistent with the expectations of volunteers who have made contributions in the past.
Let's broaden the question a bit:
Provided that, - the site footer for articles is modified to name contributors if there are fewer than six; - the site footer also refers to the page history for credit -
Are there participants in this discussion who would consider attribution-by-history-URL for pages with > 5 authors acceptable, but who would consider attribution-by-article-URL unacceptable? I think if we lower the requirements in this regard, it needs to be based on more than a discussion here, but it would be good to get some informal feedback on the question first.