On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 10:41 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com> wrote: Free content became important legal form of content since Wikipedia. And we are leaving the time when Wikipedia was a miracle with extreme amount of good faith around it. Also, all contributors were us and we don't want to sue us. As Wikipedia is becoming more and more a regular part of our civilization, we may expect more and more regular behavior. We already had malicious legal attacks in UK, Germany and France (I remember those three issues). We had a number of informal settlements, even in Serbia (a relatively famous person, a daughter of famous Yugoslavian director and translator, wanted money for some quotes at Bosnian Wikiquote). By building a position with significant holes, and attribution issue is still a significant hole, we are making unsustainable construction. If we have, let's say, 10.000.000 of contributors and 1% of them (100.000) is not happy with Wikipedia because of any reason and 1% of them (1000) want to sue WMF or whoever and 1% of them can do it, we'll have 10 big problems. We may fail in just 10% of the cases and we'll suffer from significant consequences. Note that the whole idea related to the license migration and relaxing attribution is because of content reusing, and just in small part because of Wikipedia itself (while I see benefits for Wikibooks and Wikiversity, I don't see any significant benefit for Wikipedia). Also, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are attributing all contributors. So, reusers may be sued for plagiarism ("Copyright Me and Wikipedia authors", even "Me" contributed much less significant material than 20 Wikipedia authors). After the first couple of such processes Wikipedia recommendations would loose any credibility. (And you should know better if it would be possible that WMF would be sued for misleading recommendations.) BTW, it won't be an issue if we are living in a world without bourgeois egotism :) But, we aren't living in such world. Technically, our biggest problem may be removing 100.000 edits. And it is possible to be done without endangering the project. But, we may suffer from harder consequences: If someone insists to be attributed and we say that that person has to be attributed, others will follow that example. This is especially true for projects out of English language ones. English Wikipedia, for example, has large basis of contributors who are contributing there because of free knowledge. Other projects may have significantly different contributor basis. Around a year ago around five very active contributors (of ~40 of very active contributors in that time, if I remember well) left Serbian Wikipedia. They made another project and they chose CC-BY-NC-ND license there. If they would be at the project at the time when the first contributor demands and gets attribution, I guarantee that those five contributors would be the first who would follow that contributor. In that situation I know the next ~10 contributors who would demand attribution just because previous five got... And we would end with one of two options: (1) general rule that all authors have to be attributed or (2) that 90% of authors say that they have to be attributed. So, again, useless recommendations with transitional mess. Note, again, that this is not an issue directly related to Wiki[pm]edia, but to reusing of Wiki[pm]edia content. And about moral rights doctrine: If it is not scaled well to massive collaborative enterprises, the answer is not not to address them at all, but to scale it. (I am talking again something which I don't want... I want moral rights not to be addressed, but are you sure that it will work?) BUT, if you think that there is no reasonable threat to be sued for "misleading recommendations", it doesn't cost a lot to try that way. Fixing credibility is much less dangerous than loosing two years budget.