2009/1/22 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Requirement would be to give credit via the credit URL, and by mentioning the principal authors listed at that URL. What authors will be listed at that URL is something that we may change at our leisure: for example, this may be the proposed list of five authors, or none if more than five; or it may be a list of authors that is no longer than 1% of the length of the article, or none of longer; or, when appropriate software is developed, the list of principal authors as recognised by the software; it may even differ from project to project, for example Wikisource may choose to credit the authors manually (it is already doing something similar); and so on and so forth.
This is a constructive and useful proposal, thank you.
I agree with Milos when he states in another thread that we need to think further about a solution that is satisfactory to a greater number of people, at least when it comes to standardizing attribution requirements with effective application to all past edits ever made. (At minimum, I would like some more data to inform our decisions.) I also believe that the Wikimedia Foundation can responsibly and reasonably determine what attribution model it wants to apply going forward.
For example, if WMF decides that a guaranteed by-name attribution is not reasonable, scalable, and detrimental to the goals of WMF, it can responsibly tell people that. People who have made past edits could be given the option to have _those_ edits always attributed by name. The community could gradually factor out those edits if it considers them to be cumbersome.
This would cause some people to leave, but WMF could decide that causing some people to leave or fork is worth it in order to encourage greater re-use of content. It's similar to telling people that multimedia files for noncommercial use only are not welcome. Essentially, it would be a further refinement of the standards of freedom for the projects.