2009/1/23 George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com>om>: Either it's reasonable, or it's not. If you feel the need to give people the option of opting out, then obviously you think it isn't reasonable. Also, why should people that have edited in the past and then moved on not get the same rights as current editors?

2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>: Essentially, by doing this, you'd be saying: "We disagree with you, but we're not interested in engaging in a prolonged battle over perceived author rights in a massively collaborative work with you. So if you really have a beef with our attribution model, which is the result of many months of deliberation and consultation, you can use this setting to be attributed in a way for your past edits that's consistent with your perception and beliefs about what rights you have retained under the terms of use in the past. " "However, we think that the notion that print-outs of massively collaborative works should carry author attribution over multiple pages, that spoken versions should contain many seconds of text-to-speech generated author lists, that indeed any re-user will have to worry about this problem, is completely counter to the principles of free culture. So, for your past edits, please click this button. We will always attribute you by name as long as we use your text, and we will probably remove your edits over time. For your future edits, we've made it abundantly clear that this isn't something we believe is required or needed. If you think it is, please contribute somewhere else." It would be, IMO, a completely defensible way to deal with a situation where a minority is trying to impose standards on an entire community which are counter to its objectives. I'm not necessarily saying that this reflects the situation we have today: I don't know how widespread the belief in the need for distribution of excessive author metadata is. I think it would be worth the effort to find out. It's my personal belief that such metadata requirements are harmful examples of non-free licensing terms, and I would be surprised to see many people defend excessive attribution as in the http://books.google.com/books?id=BaWKVqiUH-4C&pg=PT979#PPT959,M1 example (even if it's aesthetically well done and obviously pleasing to lots of German mothers). The above solution would still result in the odd situation where the article on [[France]] would say: 'See (url) for a list of authors, including Foo and Bar'. But that is a problem that could be solved over time by removing those people's contributions. It seems to me that, essentially, some people have been operating under the assumption that they are contributing in a fashion that would make the resulting work effectively non-free in much the same way other onerous restrictions do. It's too bad that they've made that assumption, given how strongly and clearly we've always emphasized the principles of freedom. I think it would be fully ethically and legally defensible to ignore this assumption as incorrect and unreasonable, but it would be nicer (and possibly less noisy) to accommodate these people as much as reasonably possible while explaining that the 'free' in 'free encyclopedia' is inconsistent with hassling re-users about the inclusion of kilobytes worth of largely meaningless author metadata. I'm not advocating one path over another at this point, though. Flexible and vague clauses can work well when you're dealing with issues with few stakeholders who all have a shared and tacit understanding of what they want to accomplish. By definition, massive collaboration isn't such a situation: any one of hundreds or thousands of contributors to a document can behave unreasonably, interpreting rules to the detriment of others. The distributed ownership of copyright to a single work is an example of what Michael Heller calls 'gridlock' or an 'anticommons'. Ironically, even with free content licenses, the gridlock effects of copyright can still come into play. I believe it's our obligation to give our reusers protection from being hassled by people insisting on heavy attribution requirements, and to create consistency in reuse guidelines. Really, WMF and its chapters can hardly develop partnerships with content reusers if we can't give clarity on what's required of them. A great deal of free information reuse may not be happening because of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I would much rather remove all doubt that our content is free to be reused without onerous restrictions. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

2009/1/22 geni <geniice(a)gmail.com>om>: A single URL could point to a list of all contributors for all articles. I agree that under the proposed principles of attribution, a lot of individual names would still have to be included, though probably far fewer than right now. (They could actually be more visibly included as 'credit: foo, bar' under the articles, which IMO underscores that the proposed regime, where direct credit is given, encourages it to be more visible and significant.) One of the interesting things about the German book is that it's a collection of many thousands of tiny article summaries, which still triggers the worst of any attribution regime that requires direct name attribution. I do agree with you, Mike and others who have pointed out that we want to retain flexibility in application. I'm not arguing for absolutely rigid attribution requirements, and to the extent that the current proposal suggests that, it should be revised. I am, however, arguing for articulating principles and demonstrating them through guidelines and examples, so that there's no ambiguity about our general understanding of what we mean with reasonable applications. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

By way of top-posting a brief preamble, let me apologize if someone thinks it tacky to reply to a week old posting, but I personally needed to reflect a bit before my precise position has clarified on some issues, which I do want to address. Erik Moeller wrote: I think the problem I have with this is the view that wikipedia is merely a massive collaboration. It certainly is that too, but we certainly have not shied away from also importing works from already published sources, while their licensing has been compatible. If it is your intention to indicate a radical shift that would forever prevent this practice, and require that all content be composed on-site, it would be useful if you came right out and said so, so we could all address this issue head on. But there is a real problem of saying that those who have created such material under a compatible license, have also implicitly agreed with site terms of use. Well, I think it would be really bad if WMF and its chapters willfully mislead their partners on what was legally required to allow reuse in the maximum of jurisdictions that are compatible with the base licensing, never mind what site terms of use say. It is a simple inescapable fact that international laws on Intellectual Property are complex, and it is because of this that the Creative Commons accommodate multiple jurisdictions interoperability as far as possible. If it were the case that WMF in the interest of claiming to "clarify" issues, when they in fact will cloud the real complexity by expressing a false simplicity, where none obtains; well, in my personal opinion, that would not be all that useful. Terms of use can require things beyond the licensing, I suppose, such as waiving rights, in jurisdictions where that can be done (I believe in Canada you can waive moral rights for instance), or contractually agree to not pursue some rights, even though they theoretically are still yours, but that still leaves jurisdictions where moral rights are inalienable, and the conundrum of content not created under site terms of use, but merely imported under a license which would be compatible with the license our content would be under, but not under any reasonable understanding of the terms of use further requirements to rescind some rights that are not impinged upon by the license itself. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen