On Thursday 22 January 2009 02:31:54 Sam Johnston wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
"Das Wikipedia Lexikon in einem Band"[1] is
another stunning example of
attribution gone mad
A few pages of names in a 1000 page book doesn't seem that mad to me.
I think it makes an excellent point about how Wikipedia works.
Perhaps, but it delivers ZERO benefit to the pseudonymous individuals
I do not edit pseudonymously, and even if I would, I know it would deliver a
non-zero benefit to me.
listed and exacts a non-trivial toll on the reuser.
This is further
Compared with all the other work that goes into typesetting and printing a
book, it is indeed trivial. A list of all authors of an article could be
easily extracted from a copy of the Wikipedia database with a single SQL
query.
amplified for partial reuse of a resource, reuse of
multiple resources,
reuse with tangible mediums (esp non-print e.g. t-shirts) and so on.
The attribution should be reasonable to the medium. I don't expect to have
such a list of authors if a portion of a Wikipedia article is printed on a
cup. I expect it if entire article is printed in a book.
Carrying on with the France example[1], you can double
the length of that
list with IP numbers (which would likely have to be included too) and
Why would IP numbers have to be included?
consider that if the article has accrued 5,000
contributors over the last 5
years or so, how many will it have in 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?
I think that France is an extreme example, and that most articles have far
fewer authors. I can't check for English, but an average article on Serbian
Wikipedia has 10 authors, and on German Wikipedia 5 authors.