This is a request for comment. I've posted a draft proposal for the license update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update
It is not intended to be final, but I hope we can arrive at a final version by February 1.
We would appreciate questions, comments, feedback. If there are obvious edits which you feel would make the proposal clearer, please do go ahead and make them, but please be careful about edits that substantially alter the proposal itself.
Thanks! Erik
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
This is a request for comment. I've posted a draft proposal for the license update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update
It is not intended to be final, but I hope we can arrive at a final version by February 1.
We would appreciate questions, comments, feedback. If there are obvious edits which you feel would make the proposal clearer, please do go ahead and make them, but please be careful about edits that substantially alter the proposal itself.
Thanks! Erik
"to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors."
1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the page. 2)the methods you would have to use to make this legal make wikipedia incompatible with other CC works (and also result in the rather amusing situation of trying to present a URL as an attribution party). Since they could not be added to a wikipedia page since the external author would not have agreed to such attribution parties.
While I strongly object to the use of clause 4(c)i by the foundation on the grounds of principle alone I can see no way a URL can be considered an attribution party within the context of the license and thus no way the 4th part of the lead can be legal.
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the page.
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
4(c)(iii) is irrelevant. The foundation not the licensor and the URL is on top of other attribution and copyright stuff. The only way attribution methods can be controlled through CC-BY-SA-3.0 is through 4(c)(i).
Again lets go through that section you have two things you can attribute to:
"the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied"
However since you reject that we have to move onto the second half:
"if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;"
So yes you can mess with the attribution requirements using that part of the clause but trying to define say "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canal&action=history" as an Attribution Party is somewhat unreasonable in the context of the paragraph and in the general legal use of the term party.
Remember even if you do think you can somehow squeeze this though it still causes issues with wikipedia's habit of deleting things from time to time and prevent the import of CC-BY-SA 3.0 text from third parties.
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 6:57 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
4(c)(iii) is irrelevant. The foundation not the licensor and the URL is on top of other attribution and copyright stuff. The only way attribution methods can be controlled through CC-BY-SA-3.0 is through 4(c)(i).
How is the foundation not distributing the (independently authored) work?
Attribution methods are first controlled by 4(c) - specifically " reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing".
If Mike believes that a URL to the page history for pages with 6 or more authors is acceptable under the terms of the license, and the Creative Commons' staff attorney so agrees, then I believe that they have just defined "reasonable to the medium or means we are utilizing" in minimum legal terms, at least. If you feel that it's morally repugnant somehow then we can talk, of course, but I believe that this is both reasonable and on first glance close to the optimum balance of practical (in the sense of, can be consistently and legally followed) and ethical (in the sense of, keeping people's credits as closely associated as we can).
Again lets go through that section you have two things you can attribute to:
"the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied"
However since you reject that we have to move onto the second half:
"if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;"
So yes you can mess with the attribution requirements using that part of the clause but trying to define say "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canal&action=history" as an Attribution Party is somewhat unreasonable in the context of the paragraph and in the general legal use of the term party.
Remember even if you do think you can somehow squeeze this though it still causes issues with wikipedia's habit of deleting things from time to time and prevent the import of CC-BY-SA 3.0 text from third parties.
If we get common agreement with the CC's attorney and the populace as a whole that CC-BY-SA-3.0 means (for wikis with 6+ contributors) what we say it does, then it doesn't prevent any import or have any issue with deleting things.
If we delete a contribution, from the page text and page history, then that text is not part of the page that's being served up and to which the license applies. Legally, CC-BY-SA-3.0 could be fought over by me going in and taking all your contributions to a page and paraphrasing them, then taking you out of the "authors list" as you didn't write any text still appearing on the page. We take a more liberal view- if you contributed, you're in the history. There are exceptions - we do delete revisions in extremis. But in general, not one word you wrote can still be in a current article and you still show up and get credit now. In some cases your ideas may still be present, in some cases they have all been removed, but you still get credit except for rare and narrow circumstances.
Scenario 1: An article from Wikipedia is used elsewhere (be it on or offline), with a link to the history of the page. The article is subsequently deleted from Wikipedia (e.g. accidentally and irretrievably).
Scenario 2: Wikipedia ceases to exist in its current form. Its content is hosted elsewhere, but no link exists from the former location of the history page to the new location.
In either of those scenarios (and there's lots of other possibilities), the attribution ceases to be meaningful or useful.
In my opinion, attribution of all authors is preferable, and technically achievable.* Where that is not possible, e.g. due to space restrictions, then naming the key N authors is acceptable (and it should also be technically achievable to provide that abbreviated list). Including "Wikipedia" in the attribution is very reasonable, but not as the sole word. Providing a single URL only, which may stop working in the future, is not acceptable (although it would be acceptable as an accompaniment).
Mike
* If you don't want this cluttering up the footer, then simply have an "Authors" tab along the lines of the existing history tab. Or some sort of "Reuse this page" link with reuse instructions/guidelines on it, along the lines of "Cite this page"
On 21 Jan 2009, at 07:51, George Herbert wrote:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 6:57 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4 (c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
4(c)(iii) is irrelevant. The foundation not the licensor and the URL is on top of other attribution and copyright stuff. The only way attribution methods can be controlled through CC-BY-SA-3.0 is through 4(c)(i).
How is the foundation not distributing the (independently authored) work?
Attribution methods are first controlled by 4(c) - specifically " reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing".
If Mike believes that a URL to the page history for pages with 6 or more authors is acceptable under the terms of the license, and the Creative Commons' staff attorney so agrees, then I believe that they have just defined "reasonable to the medium or means we are utilizing" in minimum legal terms, at least. If you feel that it's morally repugnant somehow then we can talk, of course, but I believe that this is both reasonable and on first glance close to the optimum balance of practical (in the sense of, can be consistently and legally followed) and ethical (in the sense of, keeping people's credits as closely associated as we can).
Again lets go through that section you have two things you can attribute to:
"the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied"
However since you reject that we have to move onto the second half:
"if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;"
So yes you can mess with the attribution requirements using that part of the clause but trying to define say "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canal&action=history" as an Attribution Party is somewhat unreasonable in the context of the paragraph and in the general legal use of the term party.
Remember even if you do think you can somehow squeeze this though it still causes issues with wikipedia's habit of deleting things from time to time and prevent the import of CC-BY-SA 3.0 text from third parties.
If we get common agreement with the CC's attorney and the populace as a whole that CC-BY-SA-3.0 means (for wikis with 6+ contributors) what we say it does, then it doesn't prevent any import or have any issue with deleting things.
If we delete a contribution, from the page text and page history, then that text is not part of the page that's being served up and to which the license applies. Legally, CC-BY-SA-3.0 could be fought over by me going in and taking all your contributions to a page and paraphrasing them, then taking you out of the "authors list" as you didn't write any text still appearing on the page. We take a more liberal view- if you contributed, you're in the history. There are exceptions - we do delete revisions in extremis. But in general, not one word you wrote can still be in a current article and you still show up and get credit now. In some cases your ideas may still be present, in some cases they have all been removed, but you still get credit except for rare and narrow circumstances.
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
The CC wrote this license and are likely to be considered authorities if there was ever a court case. If their lawyer says this is acceptable, its probably acceptable.
________________________________ From: geni geniice@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2009 6:57:25 PM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
4(c)(iii) is irrelevant. The foundation not the licensor and the URL is on top of other attribution and copyright stuff. The only way attribution methods can be controlled through CC-BY-SA-3.0 is through 4(c)(i).
Again lets go through that section you have two things you can attribute to:
"the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied"
However since you reject that we have to move onto the second half:
"if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;"
So yes you can mess with the attribution requirements using that part of the clause but trying to define say "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canal&action=history" as an Attribution Party is somewhat unreasonable in the context of the paragraph and in the general legal use of the term party.
Remember even if you do think you can somehow squeeze this though it still causes issues with wikipedia's habit of deleting things from time to time and prevent the import of CC-BY-SA 3.0 text from third parties.
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
4(c)(iii) is irrelevant. The foundation not the licensor and the URL is on top of other attribution and copyright stuff. The only way attribution methods can be controlled through CC-BY-SA-3.0 is through 4(c)(i).
You are making an unsupported assertion. CC-BY-SA is precisely structured (as are all BY licenses) to support attribution URIs; that is why 4(c)(iii) exists. CC metadata standards allow for attribution URIs [1], and when you license a work through the CC website, you can specify an attribution URI as an alternative to a name. You are confused by the attribution parties clause; it has nothing to do with the explicit provisions for URIs.
[1] http://creativecommons.org/ns [2] http://creativecommons.org/license/
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
4(c)(iii) is irrelevant. The foundation not the licensor and the URL is on top of other attribution and copyright stuff. The only way attribution methods can be controlled through CC-BY-SA-3.0 is through 4(c)(i).
You are making an unsupported assertion. CC-BY-SA is precisely structured (as are all BY licenses) to support attribution URIs; that is why 4(c)(iii) exists.
So you are claiming that it is section 4(c)(iii) that makes your approach valid. First problem comes with the opening to section 4(c)
"You must ... keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:"
That is an and command not an or. You have to meet everything from 4(c)(i) to 4(c)(iv)
Still lets pretend you can treat 4(c)(iii) as the sole credit clause
"to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and"
First problem is that it clearly isn't a credit clause (since the license repeated views copyright notices and credit as two separate things) now it is possible we could consider "licensing information" to include credit but I find that definition highly questionable. Then there is the "to the extent reasonably practicable" bit. By claiming 4(c)(iii) is a credit clause you are arguing that credit only need be given "to the extent reasonably practicable" rather than as an absolute credit must be given (in a form reasonable to the medium or means). Yet again this is completely unacceptable.
CC metadata standards allow for attribution URIs [1],
It allows it but not in the way you are suggesting. cc:attributionName and cc:attributionURL are separate variables. Yes someone can put a URL into cc:attributionName but most wikipedians have pseudonyms or names that don't qualify as URLs
and when you license a work through the CC website, you can specify an attribution URI as an alternative to a name.
And you would be allowed to do exactly the same on wikipedia if the account creator didn't blacklist all URLs. That people can chose an URL as a pseudonym doesn't help your case at all.
2009/1/21 geni geniice@gmail.com:
So you are claiming that it is section 4(c)(iii) that makes your approach valid. First problem comes with the opening to section 4(c)
"You must ... keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:"
That is an and command not an or. You have to meet everything from 4(c)(i) to 4(c)(iv)
Yes, and it's quite obvious that if no author name but a URL is supplied, then under 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii), a re-user would have to attribute only that URL. After all, the license clearly limits name attribution under 4(c)(i) with the clause "if supplied". The 'reasonable' restriction in 4(c)(iii) is not particularly relevant to our intended use. Furthermore, the license has to be understood in the broader context of the terms of use under which people contribute; it allows for such terms exactly to define and clarify its attribution language.
That's why the 'human readable' version of the license explicitly says that attribution must happen in the manner specified by the author or licensor, and even the CC website allows you to license a work with the only credit being a URL. This URL option is explained in the licensing help as 'The URL users of the work should link to. For example, the work's page on the author's site'. This is completely consistent with linking to an article or history page on Wikipedia.
Your repeated assertion that attribution-by-URL is somehow inconsistent with CC-BY-SA is therefore obviously untrue.
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
Yes, and it's quite obvious that if no author name but a URL is supplied, then under 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii), a re-user would have to attribute only that URL.
Irrelevant. Most wikipedians do not have usernames that are valid URLs
After all, the license clearly limits name attribution under 4(c)(i) with the clause "if supplied".
It is supplied unless you are going to allow truly anonymous editing on wikipedia.
The 'reasonable' restriction in 4(c)(iii) is not particularly relevant to our intended use.
False. Your intended use is to use URL to provide credit. With that being the case "reasonably practicable"
Furthermore, the license has to be understood in the broader context of the terms of use under which people contribute; it allows for such terms exactly to define and clarify its attribution language.
Only in certain ways and not the ones you propose.
That's why the 'human readable' version of the license explicitly says that attribution must happen in the manner specified by the author or licensor,
And we all know that the license text provides no such guarantee otherwise we hit the problem of the manner specified by the author or licensor being skywriting.
and even the CC website allows you to license a work with the only credit being a URL.
And it has already been explained to you why this is irrelevant to your proposal. Again most wikipedians do not have names or nics that are valid URLs.
This URL option is explained in the licensing help as 'The URL users of the work should link to. For example, the work's page on the author's site'. This is completely consistent with linking to an article or history page on Wikipedia.
Nope. Ever tried using that option? It kicks out "This work by www.example.com is licensed under a....." This is consistent with the license treating the URL as the author's pseudonym which can be done. Just not in the way that you are suggesting or in a way that is of any real use to wikipedia.
Your repeated assertion that attribution-by-URL is somehow inconsistent with CC-BY-SA is therefore obviously untrue.
None of the cases you suggest are attribution-by-URL but instead attribution to a pseudonym that happens to be a URL. There is an important difference.
Wikipedia can't make use of the attribution-to-a-pseudonym-that-happens-to-be-a-URL aproach because, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Canal&action=history is not the pseudonym of any author of our canal article nor can it reasonably be considered an Attribution Party.
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 03:23:51 Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the page.
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same. And as a programmer, I do not see why is this controversy necessary at all, as a number of people have presented a variety of solutions that make it possible to analyse the revisions and extract authors with satisfying accuracy.
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yuwrote:
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 03:23:51 Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the page.
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same. And as a programmer, I do not see why is this controversy necessary at all, as a number of people have presented a variety of solutions that make it possible to analyse the revisions and extract authors with satisfying accuracy.
I disagree. The technical analysis misses contributions which remain in conceptual form (layout of a page, sections completely rewritten but not reconceptualized). It also is error prone. Original authorship of text returned to an article by later editors after it's deleted by an intermediate editor is often hard to properly automatically trace, as it can require n-way compares with n large.
There's nothing wrong with this method of attribution - it's better than we have or require now. It's less than what GFDL says it requires, sure, but Wikipedia has never held to the letter of that, and anyone who's contributed to Wikipedia once they were aware of that can be held to have implicitly waived that particular GFDL clause in favor of "what we're actually doing".
This improves what we actually do. Why would you think it's worse?
George Herbert wrote:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yuwrote:
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 03:23:51 Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the page.
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same. And as a programmer, I do not see why is this controversy necessary at all, as a number of people have presented a variety of solutions that make it possible to analyse the revisions and extract authors with satisfying accuracy.
I disagree. The technical analysis misses contributions which remain in conceptual form (layout of a page, sections completely rewritten but not reconceptualized). It also is error prone. Original authorship of text
There is no one single technical analysis. There are various methods of analysis proposed, including ones that could identify changes to layout without change of contents. Either way, it is better to identify authors 99% of the time, than not to identify them at all.
There's nothing wrong with this method of attribution - it's better than we
Yes, there is. I am an author, and I do not consider this method of attribution appropriate.
have or require now. It's less than what GFDL says it requires, sure, but Wikipedia has never held to the letter of that, and anyone who's contributed to Wikipedia once they were aware of that can be held to have implicitly waived that particular GFDL clause in favor of "what we're actually doing".
Translation: what we are doing right now is wrong and no one complains too loudly, therefore we may get away with being even more wrong in the future.
This improves what we actually do. Why would you think it's worse?
No it doesn't. For example, German Wikireaders are published with a list of all the authors at the end, and after this change they wouldn't have to be.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
Translation: what we are doing right now is wrong and no one complains too loudly, therefore we may get away with being even more wrong in the future.
No, what we are doing now is not wrong. What we're doing now is uniformly and universally accepted in the en.wp community and nearly all the rest of them. Claiming that it's wrong is like calling black white.
It is not entirely consistent with the as-written text of the license. But it is not wrong. It is what it is, and millions of people, knowing what it says and means, have contributed.
This improves what we actually do. Why would you think it's worse?
No it doesn't. For example, German Wikireaders are published with a list of all the authors at the end, and after this change they wouldn't have to be.
I don't know that listing thousands of authors on popular pages is an improvement over a link saying "Many people wrote and edited this and you can click <here> to see them all".
We're not a co-author credit factory. CC-BY-SA isn't an ego trip for thousands of co-contributors. These are inappropriate uses for article space and page display space.
I want anyone to know what I wrote in Wikipedia, which they can find... by clicking on either a page history, or my account's Special:Contributions page. I don't want anyone to have to wade through a thousand names at the bottom of the article. The new license matches the technical code as written, and community expectations of the biggest WP communities and the vast bulk of the WP communities. One community among many can't stand up and block a new license on the grounds that it's not widely expressive enough.
If de.wp community wants to keep displaying more authors, nothing in the license keeps you from doing so. But, that's wierd, and wrong, and you should not try and impose it on the rest of us. And trying to keep it out of the license approaches the level of active evil.
George Herbert wrote:
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 1:09 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
Translation: what we are doing right now is wrong and no one complains too loudly, therefore we may get away with being even more wrong in the future.
No, what we are doing now is not wrong. What we're doing now is uniformly and universally accepted in the en.wp community and nearly all the rest of them. Claiming that it's wrong is like calling black white.
Something could be uniformly and universally accepted, and still wrong. This is one of such things.
Anyway, you are missing the point entirely. Online, where everything is a click away, having a link to the article history is practically the same thing as reproducing the list of authors. Of course, it would be even better if we would have the ability to display a list of authors, better still if we could somehow separate major and minor contributors and so on.
But the issue here is appropriate attribution offline. It is proposed that appropriate attribution in a print work is a printed URL of the list of authors. Me and other people believe that this isn't actually appropriate.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 4:29 AM, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.comwrote:
I don't know that listing thousands of authors on popular pages is an improvement over a link saying "Many people wrote and edited this and you can click <here> to see them all".
What popular page has thousands of authors? Are you counting reverted vandals, or something?
Maybe people don't want to spend 2 hours sorting out authors? Also, the history link allows someone to look at every single contribution,
________________________________ From: Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2009 1:09:22 AM Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] RfC: License update proposal
George Herbert wrote:
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 10:18 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yuwrote:
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 03:23:51 Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/20 geni geniice@gmail.com:
1)This isn't legal within anything close to the current wording of the page.
CC General Counsel has confirmed that our proposed attribution model is consistent with the language of CC-BY-SA. There is no need to use attribution parties - our proposed approach is consistent with 4(c)(i) and 4(c)(iii).
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same. And as a programmer, I do not see why is this controversy necessary at all, as a number of people have presented a variety of solutions that make it possible to analyse the revisions and extract authors with satisfying accuracy.
I disagree. The technical analysis misses contributions which remain in conceptual form (layout of a page, sections completely rewritten but not reconceptualized). It also is error prone. Original authorship of text
There is no one single technical analysis. There are various methods of analysis proposed, including ones that could identify changes to layout without change of contents. Either way, it is better to identify authors 99% of the time, than not to identify them at all.
There's nothing wrong with this method of attribution - it's better than we
Yes, there is. I am an author, and I do not consider this method of attribution appropriate.
have or require now. It's less than what GFDL says it requires, sure, but Wikipedia has never held to the letter of that, and anyone who's contributed to Wikipedia once they were aware of that can be held to have implicitly waived that particular GFDL clause in favor of "what we're actually doing".
Translation: what we are doing right now is wrong and no one complains too loudly, therefore we may get away with being even more wrong in the future.
This improves what we actually do. Why would you think it's worse?
No it doesn't. For example, German Wikireaders are published with a list of all the authors at the end, and after this change they wouldn't have to be.
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 17:28:23 Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
Maybe people don't want to spend 2 hours sorting out authors? Also, the history link allows someone to look at every single contribution,
How does the history link allow someone to look at every single contribution, when they don't want to spend 2 hours sorting out authors?
2009/1/20 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same.
That's probably true, Nikola. The proposed attribution language is intended to balance the various positions (ranging from 'an URL should always be fine' to 'names should always be given'), the established practices, and the language of the GFDL (principal author requirement). Our hope is that a strong majority will recognize the value of such a compromise, and the improvement over current state: huge complexity for re-users, legal barriers between groups that should be able to cooperate, inconsistent and confusing interpretations of the rules.
And I don't think we can or should take the easy way out and not make a decision as to what the terms of re-use should be. But any decision is likely to offend a sub-group of people who feel it's going too far, or not far enough. Nor do we have complete freedom to pick any solution we want: we need to make an effort to be consistent with past practices. So there will be a certain degree of unhappiness, as is always the case when a time period of inconsistency and arbitrary standards is followed by a time period of equal and shared standards. (The same happened, as you will recall, after the Board implemented a licensing policy prohibiting NC licenses, etc.)
I realize that some community guidelines have asked or encouraged print re-users to include a complete list of usernames alongside articles. (This, by the way, does not satisfy the GFDL's history inclusion requirement.) Under the proposed language, that would continue to be necessary for articles which have no more than five authors. The proposed language recognizes the value of direct name attribution in those instances: for articles that are essentially the work of just one or two people; for static multimedia works; etc. It is consistent with the GFDL's standards of visible byline attribution through naming the principal authors of a document.
There are various problems with making a distinction between print and online use when it comes to name inclusion. The first problem is that there are related questions which immediately pop up: Is it reasonable for a one page print document to have half a page or more of author metadata? Is it reasonable for a t-shirt to have to include a metadata text-block? Is a DVD substantially different from a print product? Is a screen in a flight information system? So in order to deal with those cases, you start making more complex rules which, again, discourage meaningful re-use. This in spite of the fact that the usernames we are talking about, in a large number of cases, will only be unambiguous and meaningful if resolved to username URIs; the extent of their contributions can only be meaningfully ascertained when reviewing a page history.
That's why I think history or credit URIs are a reasonable attribution mechanism for works that are the result of the work of many people. I also feel that they represent a compromise between your position and that of others who have contributed.
There are various problems with making a distinction between print and online use when it comes to name inclusion. The first problem is that there are related questions which immediately pop up: Is it reasonable for a one page print document to have half a page or more of author metadata? Is it reasonable for a t-shirt to have to include a metadata text-block? Is a DVD substantially different from a print product? Is a screen in a flight information system? So in order to deal with those cases, you start making more complex rules which, again, discourage meaningful re-use. This in spite of the fact that the usernames we are talking about, in a large number of cases, will only be unambiguous and meaningful if resolved to username URIs; the extent of their contributions can only be meaningfully ascertained when reviewing a page history.
A lot of the problems you are having there are because you are trying to group things into "print" and "online". The correct dichotomy is "online" and "offline". Of course you are going to have problems classifying DVDs if your classifaction systems assumes all electronic data is only available on the internet. I don't see a problem with listing authors in fairly small print on the back of a t-shirt, seems perfectly reasonable to me. If instead of names there's just a URL on the t-shirt, does that mean I can't where it in China since people seeing it won't have any way (without significant technical know-how) to view the list of authors?
People choosing to submit work under a pseudonym have clearly indicated that they are happen to be attributed under that pseudonym, I don't see any need to provide context. (It's good to do so where practical, of course.)
Is it reasonable for a t-shirt to have to include a metadata text-block? Is a DVD substantially different from a print product?
I don't see a problem with listing authors in fairly small print on the back of a t-shirt, seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Can someone remind me why this matters in the first place? Is there some real world practical use that I'm missing?
Attribution by reference to a URL only seems reasonable for online reuse to me.
Seems like a really simple and easy to apply rule to me. If you're distributing online, you can use a URL. If you're not, you can't. That's what at least some people thought they were agreeing to when they submitted their content, and it's absolutely wrong to not recognize their right to have that followed.
2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
A lot of the problems you are having there are because you are trying to group things into "print" and "online". The correct dichotomy is "online" and "offline". Of course you are going to have problems classifying DVDs if your classifaction systems assumes all electronic data is only available on the internet. I don't see a problem with listing authors in fairly small print on the back of a t-shirt, seems perfectly reasonable to me. If instead of names there's just a URL on the t-shirt, does that mean I can't where it in China since people seeing it won't have any way (without significant technical know-how) to view the list of authors?
Nor would you be able to access the list of authors on a mirror that carries it by reference. Whether you draw the distinction between print or non-print, or between "online" and "offline", is always somewhat arbitrary, as content can change from one state to another very easily. (A file downloaded to your harddisk becomes an offline copy; so does an email attachment.) A licensing regime that relies on such arbitrary transformations of attribution is fundamentally unworkable for re-users.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Whether you draw the distinction between print or non-print, or between "online" and "offline", is always somewhat arbitrary, as content can change from one state to another very easily. (A file downloaded to your harddisk becomes an offline copy; so does an email attachment.)
How is it arbitrary? A file downloaded to your harddisk becomes an offline copy. There's nothing at all arbitrary about that.
If you're trying to imply that someone creating such a copy is thereby breaking the law, then you're being quite disingenuous. Whether it's fair dealing or fair use or legal precedent or whatever, it's clear that a court of law in any reasonable jurisdiction is going to excuse such incidental copying.
Besides, in most any jurisdiction other than US (as well as under the Berne Convention), the right to attribution is inalienable and not covered by copyright law or licenses anyway.
A licensing regime that relies on such arbitrary transformations of attribution is fundamentally unworkable for re-users.
It's not at all arbitrary. The difference between attribution being a click away and attribution being provided over a completely different medium which may or may not be available is quite clear. It's also unclear how it's unworkable. Static Wikipedia has provided author lists for quite a while, and that's without much thought at all being put into culling down the authors. It's only if you invent some convoluted scenarios involving T-shirts or postcards that it becomes unworkable.
2009/1/21 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
A lot of the problems you are having there are because you are trying to group things into "print" and "online". The correct dichotomy is "online" and "offline". Of course you are going to have problems classifying DVDs if your classifaction systems assumes all electronic data is only available on the internet. I don't see a problem with listing authors in fairly small print on the back of a t-shirt, seems perfectly reasonable to me. If instead of names there's just a URL on the t-shirt, does that mean I can't where it in China since people seeing it won't have any way (without significant technical know-how) to view the list of authors?
Nor would you be able to access the list of authors on a mirror that carries it by reference.
Ideally, a mirror would carry a local copy of the history page and link to that. Even if they don't, the problem is caused by the Chinese government being inconsistent with their polices (blocking the original while not blocking the mirror), so I think it's fair to make allowances.
Whether you draw the distinction between print or non-print, or between "online" and "offline", is always somewhat arbitrary, as content can change from one state to another very easily. (A file downloaded to your harddisk becomes an offline copy; so does an email attachment.) A licensing regime that relies on such arbitrary transformations of attribution is fundamentally unworkable for re-users.
I don't think there's an ambiguity there - when you view anything online it becomes a local copy, but I think it's perfectly clear in the vast majority of cases whether it's an online or offline source (there may be the odd corner case, there often is, there is rarely any option beyond common sense for dealing with them).
Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton:
A lot of the problems you are having there are because you are trying to group things into "print" and "online". The correct dichotomy is "online" and "offline". Of course you are going to have problems classifying DVDs if your classifaction systems assumes all electronic data is only available on the internet. I don't see a problem with listing authors in fairly small print on the back of a t-shirt, seems perfectly reasonable to me. If instead of names there's just a URL on the t-shirt, does that mean I can't where it in China since people seeing it won't have any way (without significant technical know-how) to view the list of authors?
Nor would you be able to access the list of authors on a mirror that carries it by reference. Whether you draw the distinction between print or non-print, or between "online" and "offline", is always somewhat arbitrary, as content can change from one state to another very easily. (A file downloaded to your harddisk becomes an offline copy; so does an email attachment.) A licensing regime that relies on such arbitrary transformations of attribution is fundamentally unworkable for re-users.
Think on it like in GPL terms. The site presents you both the bianry and the source. You decide only to download the binary. Well, that's your option. The point is, you CAN download the sources. So, if you save the page into your harddisk, and only the page, choosing not to save the authors, you're not breaking the license. Whereas if you handed anyone else book pritned from wikipedia, you must be able to answer the question "Who wrote this?" And no, "some Wikipedians" is not a valid answer, just like "a bunch of geeks" is neither an acceptable answer to "Who wrote the Linux kernel?"
If you're providing DVDs with the articles you'll have a hard time to convince me not to add the author list. However, if you're copying an article into a friend's usb key I may accept leaving the history info aside, depending on things like his means to get online, his technical abilities to find it or your knowledge that he doesn't want it.
Instead of placing the proposed guidelines into the 'Attribution' section, I think we may be able to better if instead it just said 'You must provide proper attribution to the authors' and link to a FAQ listing recommended ways to do that on a case-per-case basis. Making a definition suitable for everything, someone will always dispute it based on some obscure use case, whereas it's much easier to agree on how could attribution be provided for a postcard.
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records.
The notion that it's actually useful to anyone in that list is dubious at best. A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia. I think requiring this for, e.g., a wiki-reader on countries makes it significantly less likely for people to create such products, and I think that the benefit of free knowledge weighs greater than the benefit of credit to largely pseudonymous individuals who have never, at any point, been promised or given to understand that their name would be given a significant degree of visibility through the lifetime of the article they contribute to.
The idea that we can meaningfully define the number of cases where this requirement is onerous and the number where it isn't through simple language is not at all obvious to me. Whether something is onerous is in part a function of someone's willingness and ability to invest effort, not whether they are creating something that's intended for online and offline use. Ironically, heavy attribution requirements advantage publishing houses with armies of lawyers over individuals. People who don't care about rules will ignore any requirement we set (and realistically we have no energy or ability to enforce those requirements in most cases); unreasonable requirements primarily affect people who are trying to do the right thing, like any unnecessary emergence of bureaucracy.
But, I do not want to rehash every single argument a hundred times. As I said in a different thread, I think it may be useful to include at least a preference poll in the licensing vote to better understand where different people are on this issue. Attribution-by-URL under certain circumstances is consistent with many people's expectations and preference, but clearly not with everyone's. If there's a predominant conception of an acceptable attribution regime, that would make developing a consistent model easier.
Erik
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2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records.
Well, the attribution list is about 1/6 the length of the article (in terms of bytes). Given that it can be in significantly smaller font size, doesn't have lots of whitespace and has no images, it's going to take up far less than 1/6 as much space on the page. It will be a significant amount of space, but not an impractical one (to the extent that copying and pasting into Word gives meaningful results, the article takes up 35 pages, the attribution list takes up 2).
The notion that it's actually useful to anyone in that list is dubious at best. A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia. I think requiring this for, e.g., a wiki-reader on countries makes it significantly less likely for people to create such products, and I think that the benefit of free knowledge weighs greater than the benefit of credit to largely pseudonymous individuals who have never, at any point, been promised or given to understand that their name would be given a significant degree of visibility through the lifetime of the article they contribute to.
That's as may be, but I don't think it's our decision to make.
But, I do not want to rehash every single argument a hundred times. As I said in a different thread, I think it may be useful to include at least a preference poll in the licensing vote to better understand where different people are on this issue. Attribution-by-URL under certain circumstances is consistent with many people's expectations and preference, but clearly not with everyone's. If there's a predominant conception of an acceptable attribution regime, that would make developing a consistent model easier.
Whether or not something is sufficient to comply with licensing requirements isn't something that can be decided democratically.
2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Whether or not something is sufficient to comply with licensing requirements isn't something that can be decided democratically.
We're operating in a space with a high degree of ambiguity. The point would be to determine whether there's a clear and shared expectation of what constitutes reasonable attribution requirements or not. It would be an information gathering poll, rather than a decision-making vote.
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Whether or not something is sufficient to comply with licensing requirements isn't something that can be decided democratically.
We're operating in a space with a high degree of ambiguity. The point would be to determine whether there's a clear and shared expectation of what constitutes reasonable attribution requirements or not. It would be an information gathering poll, rather than a decision-making vote.
You need to be very careful how you interpret it, since it's a self-selecting sample. The people sufficiently committed to the projects to vote (eg. not people that edited once or twice and then left) are more likely than the general population of editors to be tolerant of bending the rules for the benefit of the projects, I would think.
Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
2009/1/21 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Whether or not something is sufficient to comply with licensing requirements isn't something that can be decided democratically.
We're operating in a space with a high degree of ambiguity. The point would be to determine whether there's a clear and shared expectation of what constitutes reasonable attribution requirements or not. It would be an information gathering poll, rather than a decision-making vote.
You need to be very careful how you interpret it, since it's a self-selecting sample. The people sufficiently committed to the projects to vote (eg. not people that edited once or twice and then left) are more likely than the general population of editors to be tolerant of bending the rules for the benefit of the projects, I would think.
It's somewhat opposite in my experience---highly active Wikipedians are much more knowledgeable and pedantic about copyright and attribution, whereas people who've edited a few times mostly aren't. Most "normal" people I've introduced to Wikipedia who've made a few miscellaneous edits were, when I mentioned this relicensing debate, somewhat surprised, as they had been under the impression that Wikipedia owned the copyright on their edits (which is the case at most other "social media" or "crowdsourcing" sites people are used to participating in). Most also, in a brief 4-person straw poll, were entirely confused by the debate about attribution, with queries along the lines of "but Wikipedia articles don't list their authors anyway, do they?"
-Mark
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records.
Well, the attribution list is about 1/6 the length of the article (in terms of bytes). Given that it can be in significantly smaller font size, doesn't have lots of whitespace and has no images, it's going to take up far less than 1/6 as much space on the page. It will be a significant amount of space, but not an impractical one (to the extent that copying and pasting into Word gives meaningful results, the article takes up 35 pages, the attribution list takes up 2).
Which is fine if you're reprinting the whole article, but what if you're just reprinting the lede, or some other section of an article? Should a reuser still be required to reprint 2 pages of credits for a paragraph of article? That seems onerous. Note that just reprinting a *section* of an article is how many print reuse cases have worked to date (the German encyclopedia and our CafePress bumperstickers come to mind), and this case is not something that we've discussed much so far.
And having just actually done this, with a real book and a real publisher, in "How Wikipedia Works," I can attest that it's a non-trivial amount of work to get author lists for articles -- removing duplication, IPs, formatting, etc is all a good deal of work -- and I like to think I understand how histories work. It would be a much bigger task for someone who didn't understand histories or the license.
The Wikiblame tool, if it were made widely accessible and prominently integrated into the site, seems like a promising solution. In the meantime, I think we ought to consider what "proper credit" is for just reusing a part of an article, versus the whole thing.
-- phoebe
2009/2/2 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
Which is fine if you're reprinting the whole article, but what if you're just reprinting the lede, or some other section of an article? Should a reuser still be required to reprint 2 pages of credits for a paragraph of article? That seems onerous. Note that just reprinting a *section* of an article is how many print reuse cases have worked to date (the German encyclopedia and our CafePress bumperstickers come to mind), and this case is not something that we've discussed much so far.
Very few articles require a page's worth of credit. Remember even the German has an average of 23.65 edits per page and the midpoint is likely much lower.
And having just actually done this, with a real book and a real publisher, in "How Wikipedia Works," I can attest that it's a non-trivial amount of work to get author lists for articles -- removing duplication, IPs, formatting, etc is all a good deal of work -- and I like to think I understand how histories work. It would be a much bigger task for someone who didn't understand histories or the license.
It is true we need an extension built into mediawiki to handle at least part of this.
The Wikiblame tool, if it were made widely accessible and prominently integrated into the site, seems like a promising solution. In the meantime, I think we ought to consider what "proper credit" is for just reusing a part of an article, versus the whole thing.
-- phoebe
Legally you are required to credit every author who's work that section is a derivative of.
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:23 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
Very few articles require a page's worth of credit. Remember even the German has an average of 23.65 edits per page and the midpoint is likely much lower.
True. Although as a caveat remember that people aren't going to be publishing/printing a bunch of articles that are stubby or immature. The best articles, and the ones most like to be printed and distributed off of Wikipedia will likely be the ones that the most hands have touched. We aren't interested in the average case of all articles. A better metric would be the average number of edits from among the various good or featured articles, since these are the articles that people are going to want to print/distribute.
--Andrew Whitworth
Here is a WikiBlame tool that serves as a demo: http://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php I've come up with an algorithm to speed up the search when you don't know the article title (a case this doesn't handle) but you can't get around needing a monster index.
The easiest way to do this is to make the LuceneSearch extension grok the full history dump and then layer the search algorithm on top of it based on standard Lucene search.
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 11:07 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 4:36 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records.
Well, the attribution list is about 1/6 the length of the article (in terms of bytes). Given that it can be in significantly smaller font size, doesn't have lots of whitespace and has no images, it's going to take up far less than 1/6 as much space on the page. It will be a significant amount of space, but not an impractical one (to the extent that copying and pasting into Word gives meaningful results, the article takes up 35 pages, the attribution list takes up 2).
Which is fine if you're reprinting the whole article, but what if you're just reprinting the lede, or some other section of an article? Should a reuser still be required to reprint 2 pages of credits for a paragraph of article? That seems onerous. Note that just reprinting a *section* of an article is how many print reuse cases have worked to date (the German encyclopedia and our CafePress bumperstickers come to mind), and this case is not something that we've discussed much so far.
And having just actually done this, with a real book and a real publisher, in "How Wikipedia Works," I can attest that it's a non-trivial amount of work to get author lists for articles -- removing duplication, IPs, formatting, etc is all a good deal of work -- and I like to think I understand how histories work. It would be a much bigger task for someone who didn't understand histories or the license.
The Wikiblame tool, if it were made widely accessible and prominently integrated into the site, seems like a promising solution. In the meantime, I think we ought to consider what "proper credit" is for just reusing a part of an article, versus the whole thing.
-- phoebe
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Hear hear!
"Das Wikipedia Lexikon in einem Band"[1] is another stunning example of attribution gone mad and reusers would always have the option of crediting authors anyway (perhaps guided by author preferences expressed on the talk page or some other interface).
Most critically however, "the benefit of free knowledge weighs greater than the benefit of credit to largely pseudonymous individuals who have never, at any point, been promised [anything]". Well said - thanks for this enlightening and comprehensive review of the situation.
I would hope that URLs point to the article itself which is far more useful (and cleaner) than the history page, and that they would be optional depending on the medium (eg web/pdf vs paper/print). Aside from that agree 100% with everything you've said and look forward to seeing what the poll and/or vote.
Sam
http://books.google.com/books?id=BaWKVqiUH-4C&pg=PT979
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:11 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records.
The notion that it's actually useful to anyone in that list is dubious at best. A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia. I think requiring this for, e.g., a wiki-reader on countries makes it significantly less likely for people to create such products, and I think that the benefit of free knowledge weighs greater than the benefit of credit to largely pseudonymous individuals who have never, at any point, been promised or given to understand that their name would be given a significant degree of visibility through the lifetime of the article they contribute to.
The idea that we can meaningfully define the number of cases where this requirement is onerous and the number where it isn't through simple language is not at all obvious to me. Whether something is onerous is in part a function of someone's willingness and ability to invest effort, not whether they are creating something that's intended for online and offline use. Ironically, heavy attribution requirements advantage publishing houses with armies of lawyers over individuals. People who don't care about rules will ignore any requirement we set (and realistically we have no energy or ability to enforce those requirements in most cases); unreasonable requirements primarily affect people who are trying to do the right thing, like any unnecessary emergence of bureaucracy.
But, I do not want to rehash every single argument a hundred times. As I said in a different thread, I think it may be useful to include at least a preference poll in the licensing vote to better understand where different people are on this issue. Attribution-by-URL under certain circumstances is consistent with many people's expectations and preference, but clearly not with everyone's. If there's a predominant conception of an acceptable attribution regime, that would make developing a consistent model easier.
Erik
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On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
"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 listed and exacts a non-trivial toll on the reuser. This is further 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.
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 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?
While the toll can be reduced by automation it cannot be removed altogether and this does not change the fact that the result delivers ZERO value to anyone (authors, readers, reusers, the environment and Wikipedia as a whole).
Sam
1. http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl?lang=en.wikipedia&page...
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Sam Johnston samj@samj.net wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com
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 listed and exacts a non-trivial toll on the reuser.
Depends on the pseudonym, but for the most part you're right. On the other hand, Mediawiki has long supported the "real name" preference, and even says "Real name is optional. If you choose to provide it, this will be used for giving you attribution for your work."
Regrettably, Wikipedia chose not to enable that field.
On Thursday 22 January 2009 02:31:54 Sam Johnston wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Thomas Dalton
thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
"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.
Sam Johnston wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:07 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
"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 listed and exacts a non-trivial toll on the reuser. This is further 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.
While the toll can be reduced by automation it cannot be removed altogether and this does not change the fact that the result delivers ZERO value to anyone (authors, readers, reusers, the environment and Wikipedia as a whole).
Sam
And ??? So can you say about any attribution license and pretty much any free license. *I* have (co)written that article. I have given it for free, which I didn't need to. Now, *YOU* want to use *MY* article. Well, follow the terms or don't use it.
If you're so concerned about not listing me, you can always ask me a commercial license for omitting it. It removes your requirement, and delivers greater than zero benefit to me. It may be enough for me to see my name on that page. What is unacceptable is to remove the attribution just because "it delivers zero benefit", when it is the *ONLY* benefit I get.
I might understand many reasons not to provide attribution. But this one is completely inadmissible.
Erik Moeller wrote:
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article. Needless to say, in a print product, this would occupy a very significant amount of space. Needless to say, equally, it's a significant obligation for a re-user. And, of course, Wikipedia keeps growing and so do its attribution records.
The notion that it's actually useful to anyone in that list is dubious at best. A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia. I think requiring this for, e.g., a wiki-reader on countries makes it significantly less likely for people to create such products,
Not that creating a wiki-reader of countries is easier either. Although if they are using WMF articles dumps they'll have more problems because they don't include attribution. So the problem is basically collecting the authors. If they were incorporated (eg. bug 16082) showing the list is even easier than the content itself.
The idea that we can meaningfully define the number of cases where this requirement is onerous and the number where it isn't through simple language is not at all obvious to me. Whether something is onerous is in part a function of someone's willingness and ability to invest effort, not whether they are creating something that's intended for online and offline use.
We can at least document what we consider not onerous (ie. lazyness on part of the reuser not to do). I think we can advance much more on that path (and maybe then generalise). One of such statements could be "A DVD release shouldn't include just a url to the history". Anyone here doesn't find it reasonable?
Yes, there will be borderline cases, but most of them can be grouped together. If people find that is onerous we should also work on making the task easier for them (eg. adding an Authors tab as proposed). For instance, it once was hard to get the contributors list. Now there're several tools to do it.
On Thursday 22 January 2009 01:11:15 Erik Moeller wrote:
Because I don't think it's good to discuss attribution as an abstract principle, just as an example, the author attribution for the article [[France]] is below, excluding IP addresses. According to the view that attribution needs to be given to each pseudonym, this entire history would have to be included with every copy of the article.
I have attempted to do something similar, by using the WikiBlame tool ( http://hewgill.com/~greg/wikiblame/ ) on the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens , that is also fairly large and fairly edited article.
The article as of today has 6438 revisions with 2296 distinct contributors (anonymous included) of which 945 are registered Wikipedia users (for comparison, the article [[France]] has 1345 distinct contributors which are registered Wikipedia users).
However, according to http://hewgill.com/~greg/wikiblame/Athens.html and to the extent its results are correct, as of sometime in 2008, the article had 480 distinct edits made by 188 distinct contributors (anonymous included) of which 103 are registered Wikipedia users. If all edits shorter than 10 characters are excluded, then the article has 273 distinct edits, 121 distinct contributors (anonymous included) of which 63 are registered Wikipedia users. They are given below:
Adam Carr, Aexon79, Alekow, Alx bio, Argos'Dad, Aris Katsaris, AtanasioV, Athinaios, Avg, Bart133, Caponer, Cplakidas, D6, Dakart, Dialectric, Ductus, Edwy, El Greco, Eric82oslo, Eugenio Archontopoulos, Evzone, Grammar7878, Greenshed, Hectorian, Henry Carrington, IRelayer, Jiang, Jmco, Keizuko, Kompikos, Korenyuk, LMB, Makalp, Makedonas, MalafayaBot, Male1979, Markussep, Metallaxis, Michalis Famelis, MJCdetroit, Nasos12, Nikolas Karalis, Nlu, Odysses, Pabouk, Pangrati7878, PHG, Politis, Porfyrios, Pyrate1700, Radiojon, Recury, Rich Farmbrough, RTucker, Sabinpopa, Schizophonix, Sdornan, Sthenel, Tasoskessaris, Theiasofia, WHeimbigner, Zyxw
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-)
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 12:22 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-)
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
If you define "nontrivial" for me, that should not be too hard...
2009/1/23 Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com:
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
If you define "nontrivial" for me, that should not be too hard...
Nikola's cutoff above was "If all edits shorter than 10 characters are excluded..." - this sounds not unreasonable, since adding three words or more will take you over it.
I'm not sure quite how the results were obtained via WikiBlame, but it certainly seems a little more meaningful than just dumping every name which appears in the article history. (Admittedly, that has the advantage of not accidentally excluding anyone...)
2009/1/23 Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk:
2009/1/23 Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com:
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
If you define "nontrivial" for me, that should not be too hard...
Nikola's cutoff above was "If all edits shorter than 10 characters are excluded..." - this sounds not unreasonable, since adding three words or more will take you over it.
In the vast majority of cases, that will work fine. There will be the odd edit where less than 10 characters is significant (especially is the user has made lots of short edits), but probably not many. It may be "reasonable" to neglect those few corner cases.
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/1/23 Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk:
2009/1/23 Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com:
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
If you define "nontrivial" for me, that should not be too hard...
Nikola's cutoff above was "If all edits shorter than 10 characters are excluded..." - this sounds not unreasonable, since adding three words or more will take you over it.
In the vast majority of cases, that will work fine. There will be the odd edit where less than 10 characters is significant (especially is the user has made lots of short edits), but probably not many. It may be "reasonable" to neglect those few corner cases.
Especially if you include a URL to the full detail *as well*.
Of course, the tool should be updated as the technology improves. 10 characters or the details of the tool shouldn't be spelled out somewhere irrevocably.
And there should probably be some mechanism to manually override it in corner cases.
Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-)
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
I think it is useful to note that even in countries where moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of "originality" and "creative effort".
Just recently there was a question put to the Finnish "Mr. Intellectual Property law" (Jukka Kemppinen, who quite by the by, was one of the speakers at the seminar to mark 100 000 articles in the Finnish language wikipedia) on whether a text message could be considered to be sufficiently original to constitute a "work" as defined in the authors rights legislation. The situation was related to a tabloid publishing obscene text messages a government minister had sent to an exotic dancer.
According to Jukka Kemppinen, a simple two line obscene rhyming text message "Älä luota muihin, ota multa suihin." - giving a completely hypothetical example - would be quite sufficient to be a "work". (and no, I won't translate the message).
But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
I think it is useful to note that even in countries where moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of "originality" and "creative effort".
<snip>
It is not strictly true that all countries require "creativity", some jurisdictions (notably the UK) tend to use copyright to protect the expenditure of effort involved regardless of whether the work is creative. In other words, the rights follow from the fact that someone expended time and effort in creating the publication, and do not necessarily require that the publication contains an original creative expression.
This is known as the "sweat of the brow" doctrine [1] and has been explicitly rejected in US case law.
That said, I'm not sure how much effort one would have to expend in making cleanup and formatting edits to a wiki article before it could be considered enough to count. However, I do think we should give some consideration to the wikignomes that beautify and cleanup articles, even if they aren't writing lots of text. Their work, though sometimes formulaic, does improve the overall quality and consistency of the resulting product.
-Robert Rohde
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 9:08 AM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 5:22 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
I think it is useful to note that even in countries where moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of "originality" and "creative effort".
<snip>
It is not strictly true that all countries require "creativity", some jurisdictions (notably the UK) tend to use copyright to protect the expenditure of effort involved regardless of whether the work is creative. In other words, the rights follow from the fact that someone expended time and effort in creating the publication, and do not necessarily require that the publication contains an original creative expression.
Isn't this just an economic right which can be waived or traded in a broad range of circumstances, though? The individual workers who collected names for the phone book or fixed the typos therein don't get their names listed as "authors", do they?
First, right up top (not top posting; but noting something intentionally at the top of this posting), let me acknowledge that responding to one of ones own postings is considered bad form. But in my defense I will note that I am genuinely not doing so in order to prolong a thread well past its sale by date, but to correct an inadvertent error I had made, which can be of some significance, after I was informed of it.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/1/23 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Article length was 82028 bytes, and length of contributors' names is 650 bytes (or 0.8% of the article's length). If that would be printed in an encyclopedic format, the article would take some more than ten pages, and the list of authors would take 10 rows, if printed in a slightly smaller font. To me, this looks reasonable.
It's a lot less unreasonable than many suggestions! :-)
I wonder - would it be possible to get some kind of script set up to take, say, a thousand of our most popular articles and tell us what the "cite all named authors who make nontrivial contributions" result would be like? This might be a useful bit of data...
I think it is useful to note that even in countries where moral rights are inalienable, there is a requirement of "originality" and "creative effort".
Just recently there was a question put to the Finnish "Mr. Intellectual Property law" (Jukka Kemppinen, who quite by the by, was one of the speakers at the seminar to mark 100 000 articles in the Finnish language wikipedia) on whether a text message could be considered to be sufficiently original to constitute a "work" as defined in the authors rights legislation. The situation was related to a tabloid publishing obscene text messages a government minister had sent to an exotic dancer.
According to Jukka Kemppinen, a simple two line obscene rhyming text message "Älä luota muihin, ota multa suihin." - giving a completely hypothetical example - would be quite sufficient to be a "work". (and no, I won't translate the message).
But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
I have made some studies, and it appears this last sentence is in fact complete bollocks. (xcuse my french)
There is a frequently expressed view that the moral rights provision of "paternity rights" are there to protect the authors right to be identified as the originator of the work, but it is in fact (according to a finding by Finnish copyrights protection arbitration committee - which of course has no actual legal standing as a binding precedent on later court cases) somewhat more involved.
TN 1991:7 states that the paternity right extends to the level of making it obligatory to not only mention if the original authors work has been tampered in some way (adapted, translated, modified, whatever; choose your own term) but to identify specifically by whom, if known.
This is a very strong finding, though as far as I know untested in an actual court of law here.
I am sure most cases of shuffling punctuation around and such is not something that can be considered creative acts, but certainly they would qualify as modifications. And I was recently reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" (published as "The Snake" in The Republican) had a change of a single punctuation mark, which in her own view changed the meaning of it completely on its head; so even a mechanical application of considering punctuation changes as minor, is not universally defensible.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com
wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
I have made some studies, and it appears this last sentence is in fact complete bollocks. (xcuse my french)
There is a frequently expressed view that the moral rights provision of "paternity rights" are there to protect the authors right to be identified as the originator of the work, but it is in fact (according to a finding by Finnish copyrights protection arbitration committee - which of course has no actual legal standing as a binding precedent on later court cases) somewhat more involved.
TN 1991:7 states that the paternity right extends to the level of making it obligatory to not only mention if the original authors work has been tampered in some way (adapted, translated, modified, whatever; choose your own term) but to identify specifically by whom, if known.
This is a very strong finding, though as far as I know untested in an actual court of law here.
I am sure most cases of shuffling punctuation around and such is not something that can be considered creative acts, but certainly they would qualify as modifications. And I was recently reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" (published as "The Snake" in The Republican) had a change of a single punctuation mark, which in her own view changed the meaning of it completely on its head; so even a mechanical application of considering punctuation changes as minor, is not universally defensible.
I hope you don't mind my abbreviation of your original context. Anyone who didn't read the original post can scroll back a few messages to see it.
Anyway, it seems to me that the purported moral right you're speaking of would be a right of the original author, and not a right of the person making the modification. Am I correct in this assumption?
If so, I think it has significance in the how that right should be protected, if indeed one is to accept that it is a right. In that sense, I'm not sure how "modified by a bunch of idiots on Wikipedia" is any worse than "modified by [insert a bunch of psudonyms here]".
On the other hand, the GFDL (via the section entitled History) certainly protects this purported right much stronger than CC-BY-SA under any interpretation. CC-BY-SA mostly attempts to punt on these issues, leaving it to the laws of the individual states (and in some cases to the terms of service of the individual ISPs where the content is first contributed).
Personally I think there ought to be a philosophical discussion of whether or not this is a right the WMF wishes to recognize, and if so, to what extent. Only by answering that question can this issue be rationally resolved, and once that question is answered the specifics should come quite naturally. But there seems to be a reluctance to engage in such discussion on this mailing list.
So, might as well just flip a coin.
Anthony wrote:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com
wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
But I am sure there are no applicable moral rights to let's say correcting missing space around punctuation.
I have made some studies, and it appears this last sentence is in fact complete bollocks. (xcuse my french)
There is a frequently expressed view that the moral rights provision of "paternity rights" are there to protect the authors right to be identified as the originator of the work, but it is in fact (according to a finding by Finnish copyrights protection arbitration committee - which of course has no actual legal standing as a binding precedent on later court cases) somewhat more involved.
TN 1991:7 states that the paternity right extends to the level of making it obligatory to not only mention if the original authors work has been tampered in some way (adapted, translated, modified, whatever; choose your own term) but to identify specifically by whom, if known.
This is a very strong finding, though as far as I know untested in an actual court of law here.
I am sure most cases of shuffling punctuation around and such is not something that can be considered creative acts, but certainly they would qualify as modifications. And I was recently reminded of the Emily Dickinson poem "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass" (published as "The Snake" in The Republican) had a change of a single punctuation mark, which in her own view changed the meaning of it completely on its head; so even a mechanical application of considering punctuation changes as minor, is not universally defensible.
I hope you don't mind my abbreviation of your original context. Anyone who didn't read the original post can scroll back a few messages to see it.
Anyway, it seems to me that the purported moral right you're speaking of would be a right of the original author, and not a right of the person making the modification. Am I correct in this assumption?
I think you have hit the nail on the head there. But of course there is a bigger can of worms to be opened, in the sense that even though the original author would under this theory have an imperative right to make known all modifiers, it is very unclear whether some forms of modification would confer equal authorship rights to *their own modified version*. This is of course in particular interest to translators; but in the wikipedia context would be relevant to any editors who substantively improved an article.
If it were legally defensible to claim such rights, it would of course only apply to modifications made to the version they had sufficiently modified to confer a legitimate authorship right to it. There is no way to grand-father authorship rights even under the moral rights regime.
If so, I think it has significance in the how that right should be protected, if indeed one is to accept that it is a right. In that sense, I'm not sure how "modified by a bunch of idiots on Wikipedia" is any worse than "modified by [insert a bunch of psudonyms here]".
On the other hand, the GFDL (via the section entitled History) certainly protects this purported right much stronger than CC-BY-SA under any interpretation. CC-BY-SA mostly attempts to punt on these issues, leaving it to the laws of the individual states (and in some cases to the terms of service of the individual ISPs where the content is first contributed).
I have no opinion on this point in support of your view, but will not present my objections publicly either.
Personally I think there ought to be a philosophical discussion of whether or not this is a right the WMF wishes to recognize, and if so, to what extent. Only by answering that question can this issue be rationally resolved, and once that question is answered the specifics should come quite naturally. But there seems to be a reluctance to engage in such discussion on this mailing list.
This point is one I wholly subscribe to though.
Yours in amity,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia.
Apropos of which, a thought. We have spilled a good bit of ink over whether or not it is appropriate for the reuser to attribute "Wikipedia users" either alone or in addition to the usernames - should the project have a right to attribution, etc etc etc. In practice, wouldn't it be almost essential to name the site where the work was done *as well* as the usernames? Many of the pseudonyms, in effect, depend on that context...
(Apologies if this was raised before - I don't remember seeing it)
An article which has had many developments and been passed on might then wind up with an amalgamated attribution line like:
"by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (1962), Wikipedia contributors "NukeUser", John Smith, Jane Doe and Mike Placeholder (2004-2007), Citizendium contributors Alan White, John Smith and Betty Green (2007-2009), and anonymous contributors."
It's not exactly smooth, but it is comprehensible, and it does seem helpful to name the project to give some context to the names.
Andrew Gray wrote:
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
A vast number of pseudonyms below have no meaning except for their context in Wikipedia.
Apropos of which, a thought. We have spilled a good bit of ink over whether or not it is appropriate for the reuser to attribute "Wikipedia users" either alone or in addition to the usernames - should the project have a right to attribution, etc etc etc. In practice, wouldn't it be almost essential to name the site where the work was done *as well* as the usernames? Many of the pseudonyms, in effect, depend on that context...
(Apologies if this was raised before - I don't remember seeing it)
An article which has had many developments and been passed on might then wind up with an amalgamated attribution line like:
"by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (1962), Wikipedia contributors "NukeUser", John Smith, Jane Doe and Mike Placeholder (2004-2007), Citizendium contributors Alan White, John Smith and Betty Green (2007-2009), and anonymous contributors."
It's not exactly smooth, but it is comprehensible, and it does seem helpful to name the project to give some context to the names.
Just saying "Wikipedia users" wouldn't be a good idea, but I like this way of mentioning it.
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
If you take out the subthreads of Anthony trolling and being fed with responses, you'll see there's much less to this thread than it seems at first glance.
- d.
2009/1/24 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
If you take out the subthreads of Anthony trolling and being fed with responses, you'll see there's much less to this thread than it seems at first glance.
The same applies to most foundation-l threads, doesn't it? (Although it isn't always Anthony - plenty of people take their turns.)
David Gerard wrote:
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
If you take out the subthreads of Anthony trolling and being fed with responses, you'll see there's much less to this thread than it seems at first glance.
- d.
I think you are precisely inaccurate on this point. Quite the contrary. I seriously feel that the part where Anthony is taking on all comers, is masking the fact that there is a serious shift underway in the way WMF is operating.
WMF used to really be a (choose a heavy-weight designation) pound gorilla in the GFDL users pool.
When we transition to the Creative Commons universe, we will never again regain that status, and a combative stance will do us no favors.
So at the very minimum, it would well serve us to know what the established standards are within CC-BY-SA, in particular focusing on the "BY" part.
Yours faithfully,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
WMF used to really be a (choose a heavy-weight designation) pound gorilla in the GFDL users pool.
When we transition to the Creative Commons universe, we will never again regain that status, and a combative stance will do us no favors.
I think gaging the relative status of Wikimedia projects in the GFDL and CC-BY-SA universes by the size alone is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Wikipedia might be the only GFDL project most people could name, but in that universe the needs of GNU software manuals carry a lot of weight. The CC-BY-SA universe is much bigger and more diverse, but Wikimedia projects would be the single most influential player (in many senses already have been for years), in what I'm certain will be a very symbiotic relationship, including the parts where some members of the community take combative stances.
So at the very minimum, it would well serve us to know what the established standards are within CC-BY-SA, in particular focusing on the "BY" part.
As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is highly medium specific. Personally, I think the guidelines Erik has mooted are very much in line with what CC-BY-SA enables and the wiki medium, but there's no better group than this (meaning Wikimedia projects collectively, if not just foundation-l) to improve on these if needed.
And back to the weight of Wikimedia projects within and symbiotic relationship with the CC-BY-SA universe, if there's anything that can be done to clarify or otherwise improve license support for attribution in massively collaborative projects, I fully expect input from Wikimedia communities/projects/staff to be the most important input into shaping such improvements in any eventual versioning of CC-BY-SA.
Mike
Mike Linksvayer wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
So at the very minimum, it would well serve us to know what the established standards are within CC-BY-SA, in particular focusing on the "BY" part.
As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is highly medium specific.
That has been expressed as a preference for pragmatic reasons. I don't think anyone has in fact been talking about what the current practices are in this respect in differing media in the Creative Commons world as things stand, before WMF transitioning there. There may have been very thin mentions of other parts of WMF than wikipedia which have been Creative Commons from the git-go.
However, if what you say happens to in fact be correct (never mind if it has been previously covered in these threads or not), that would be quite significant, in particular in those jurisdictions where moral rights are defined in law. At least one legal "out" for the absolute "paternity right" to a work here in Finland, is the part that the form of attribution should accord with common methods of the field, and "good manners".
There is case-law on this. (KKO 1992:63 (Kalevala Koru)) was a decision that a jeweler did not have to include the name of the designer with the packaging of each individual piece of jewelery sold, as long as the designer was credited in a more general fashion, with the sales material etc. sent to the stores in relation to the works.
In that decision it was considered that the standard of that particular field was that the name of the artist who designed the jewelery was affixed to each piece of jewelery if the artist happened to have sufficient "name recognition", but not otherwise.
Personally, I think the guidelines Erik has mooted are very much in line with what CC-BY-SA enables and the wiki medium, but there's no better group than this (meaning Wikimedia projects collectively, if not just foundation-l) to improve on these if needed.
Equally personally, I think Erik's first suggestions were borderline legally defensible, in the sense that an argument could be framed around it, though not necessarily one that is a slam-dunk to prevail on, nor remotely a strongly persuasive one.
That said, my personal view on what is the "right thing" to do about attribution is far more nuanced than a merely legalistic one. But I won't revisit or develop it publicly at this point.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
Mike Linksvayer wrote:
As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is highly medium specific.
[snip] However, if what you say happens to in fact be correct (never mind if it has been previously covered in these threads or not), that would be quite significant, in particular in those jurisdictions where moral rights are defined in law.
I don't think there's much dispute that attribution is highly medium specific. A URL printed in a textbook is clearly much different from a URL encoded into a web page. The only question is whether the specifics should focus on the rights of the author, or on maximizing ease of redistribution.
Anthony wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
Mike Linksvayer wrote:
As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is highly medium specific.
[snip] However, if what you say happens to in fact be correct (never mind if it has been previously covered in these threads or not), that would be quite significant, in particular in those jurisdictions where moral rights are defined in law.
I don't think there's much dispute that attribution is highly medium specific.
I don't think anybody can dispute you just quoted me highly out of context.
A URL printed in a textbook is clearly much different from a URL encoded into a web page. The only question is whether the specifics should focus on the rights of the author, or on maximizing ease of redistribution.
No, that is precisely a false dilemma. there are a whole range of issues to consider, and those aren't even the necessarily most cogent ones. In some circumstances maximizing ease of redistribution and the rights of the author go hand in hand.
And in some corner cases, idiots (and I am not meaning you but specifically some of your less clueful opponents) will argue that sacrificing the authors pride of doing good in a copyleft context is a necessary price to pay to make it easier to redistribute. This is false, and I am willing to argue against this statement when posited at any forum in any fashion, if I am given my right to express my arguments.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Wed, Jan 28, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:58 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
Mike Linksvayer wrote:
As others have pointed out on this or nearby threads, attribution is highly medium specific.
[snip] However, if what you say happens to in fact be correct (never mind if it has been previously covered in these threads or not), that would be quite significant, in particular in those jurisdictions where moral rights are defined in law.
I don't think there's much dispute that attribution is highly medium specific.
I don't think anybody can dispute you just quoted me highly out of context.
If so, I must not have understood your original comment, and I apologize.
A URL printed in a textbook is clearly much different from a URL
encoded into a web page. The only question is whether the specifics
should
focus on the rights of the author, or on maximizing ease of
redistribution.
No, that is precisely a false dilemma. there are a whole range of issues to consider, and those aren't even the necessarily most cogent ones. In some circumstances maximizing ease of redistribution and the rights of the author go hand in hand.
And in some corner cases, idiots (and I am not meaning you but specifically some of your less clueful opponents) will argue that sacrificing the authors pride of doing good in a copyleft context is a necessary price to pay to make it easier to redistribute. This is false, and I am willing to argue against this statement when posited at any forum in any fashion, if I am given my right to express my arguments.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
True, but since it is unlikely anyone can prove that they wrote those early articles, they can't take any legal action because of it.
Also, I doubt that anything remains of those articles to dive credit for.
2009/1/24 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly
legally
right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
True, but since it is unlikely anyone can prove that they wrote those early articles, they can't take any legal action because of it.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I can prove what I wrote :)
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly
legally
right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
True, but since it is unlikely anyone can prove that they wrote those early articles, they can't take any legal action because of it.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
2009/1/24 The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
The switchover is an opportunity to make sure we start getting things right.
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:08 PM, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly legally right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
Who is stressed out about getting things exactly legally right?
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:08 PM, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly
legally
right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 / late 2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate author list.
Who is stressed out about getting things exactly legally right? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
This list, in the same way it overreacts to pretty much everything.
"The sky is blue!" "No it's not!" "I can see it outside" "We need a poll." "Polls are evil." "Maybe an unofficial straw poll then?" [random CIA conspiracies about polls] Etc.
I've found this format applies to pretty much all discussions on this list. It's about as predictable as a Lifetime movie.
-Chad
2009/1/24 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
This list, in the same way it overreacts to pretty much everything.
"The sky is blue!" "No it's not!" "I can see it outside" "We need a poll." "Polls are evil." "Maybe an unofficial straw poll then?" [random CIA conspiracies about polls] Etc.
I've found this format applies to pretty much all discussions on this list. It's about as predictable as a Lifetime movie.
There's a lot to be said for consistency of approach.
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 4:08 PM, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure why we're so stressed out about getting things exactly
legally
right, since once edit histories for anything created before 2002 /
late
2001 were wiped out, any of those articles don't have an accurate
author
list.
Who is stressed out about getting things exactly legally right? _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
This list, in the same way it overreacts to pretty much everything.
"The sky is blue!" "No it's not!" "I can see it outside" "We need a poll." "Polls are evil." "Maybe an unofficial straw poll then?" [random CIA conspiracies about polls] Etc.
I've found this format applies to pretty much all discussions on this list. It's about as predictable as a Lifetime movie.
Mike took us off on a tangent when he insisted that the concept of "moral rights" was a purely legal construction, but up until then I thought things were going well.
2009/1/24 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
Mike took us off on a tangent when he insisted that the concept of "moral rights" was a purely legal construction, but up until then I thought things were going well.
Or you went off on a tangent when you started talking about moral rights in a more general sense that was strictly relevant to the discussion. Either way, a tangent was certainly gone off on.
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/1/24 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
Mike took us off on a tangent when he insisted that the concept of "moral rights" was a purely legal construction, but up until then I thought
things
were going well.
Or you went off on a tangent when you started talking about moral rights in a more general sense that was strictly relevant to the discussion. Either way, a tangent was certainly gone off on.
My point of view is that the proposed license update is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. If Mike is going to deny that moral rights exist in the first place, then I feel the need to explain that they do.
I guess I could just ignore this point, as rather self-evidently false, but I was also interested in why he felt that way.
Anyway, I don't know where this leaves us. At least one moderator has suggested that this needs to stop, so it's unclear whether it's possible to discuss this issue at all.
Anthony wrote:
My point of view is that the proposed license update is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. If Mike is going to deny that moral rights exist in the first place, then I feel the need to explain that they do.
The problem is that moral rights in your sense---i.e. not the legal construct "moral rights" that exists in some countries' laws, but a more general concept of morality as it relates to authorship---boils down to settling philosophical debates on what constitutes a "right", what "morality" is, and so on. You have some opinions on these matters, while others have other opinions, and I certainly don't expect this mailing list to be the place where centuries-long debates over what (if anything) constitutes a "moral right" are resolved. So I'm not too sure what the point of the discussion is.
For what it's worth, Mike's position, that there are no pre-existing moral rights outside those granted by laws and society, is also a legitimate one, and probably the dominant view in modern philosophy of ethics (natural-law theorists aren't too common these days, outside of politics anyway).
For our purposes it boils down to: 1) What, legally, can we do as far as licensing goes? 2) Of the range of options we can legally take, which should we prefer?
You can answer #2 based on a whole range of things, depending on your personal viewpoints on ethics, personal priorities as they relate to the project, preference for being credited versus not, interest in different kinds of reuse, etc., but for our purposes these essentially boil down to various people having different opinions.
-Mark
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
For what it's worth, Mike's position, that there are no pre-existing moral rights outside those granted by laws and society, is also a legitimate one
I certainly disagree that this is a legitimate position. And in fact, if this is true, then there's no basis to make a decision anyway. There's no point in having a discussion period. There's no hope in reaching a consensus. If Mike's position is correct.
But I guess that's outside the scope of this mailing list.
Delirium wrote:
Anthony wrote:
My point of view is that the proposed license update is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. If Mike is going to deny that moral rights exist in the first place, then I feel the need to explain that they do.
The problem is that moral rights in your sense---i.e. not the legal construct "moral rights" that exists in some countries' laws, but a more general concept of morality as it relates to authorship---boils down to settling philosophical debates on what constitutes a "right", what "morality" is, and so on. You have some opinions on these matters, while others have other opinions, and I certainly don't expect this mailing list to be the place where centuries-long debates over what (if anything) constitutes a "moral right" are resolved. So I'm not too sure what the point of the discussion is.
The only reason that "moral rights" is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The only reason that "moral rights" is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger.
Ec
I would actually be interested to get the background for this interpretation of how moral rights came to happen as a legal idea. If there are such references.
Particularly as the legal reasons in at least Finnish legal manuals for laymen who have to deal with moral rights seem to focus on the utility moral rights have in terms of protecting the artisans reputation as being good at his craft.
I have great difficulty understanding how the "right to examine" could be traced to some grandiose "Rights of Man" basis, since the argument presented for this particular moral right is clearly grounded on protecting the artisan/artists ability to examine their earlier work, to remind them self and refresh their memory on methods they had employed on those works, and thus enable them to not lose skills and methods they had mastered in earlier days.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The only reason that "moral rights" is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger.
I would actually be interested to get the background for this interpretation of how moral rights came to happen as a legal idea. If there are such references.
I couldn't find the reference that I recalled from a couple of years ago, but I did find some reference to the idea at http://www.ams.org/ewing/Documents/CopyrightandAuthors-70.pdf in the section "Some philosophy".
There are profound differences at a very deep level between the rights of authors in civil law countries and the right to copy in common law countries. In common law countries copyright has been primarily an economic right instead of a personal right. It used to be that copyright disputes were framed between two publishers or between publisher and author. To the extent that the law was a balance between interests it was the interests of publishers and authors that were being balanced. That the using public could have interests was unthinkable because these users flew below the radar of cost effectiveness. If it was not economical for a person to infringe copyrights in the first place, how could it be worthwhile to lobby politicians to have these rights for the general using public. Today we have a third party whose interests were never considered in the balance.
Particularly as the legal reasons in at least Finnish legal manuals for laymen who have to deal with moral rights seem to focus on the utility moral rights have in terms of protecting the artisans reputation as being good at his craft.
I don't know anything about the history of Finnish jurisprudence, but that statement seems to draw on the French model. Canada has provisions for moral rights, but the person claiming that his reputation has been damaged would have the burden of proving that as well as proving the amount of damages. If one made a claim for $1,000,000 in damages he shouldn't expect that it will be granted just because he says so.
I have great difficulty understanding how the "right to examine" could be traced to some grandiose "Rights of Man" basis, since the argument presented for this particular moral right is clearly grounded on protecting the artisan/artists ability to examine their earlier work, to remind them self and refresh their memory on methods they had employed on those works, and thus enable them to not lose skills and methods they had mastered in earlier days.
I seem to be misunderstanding something about your stated "right to examine". Is someone claiming that authors are prevented from examining their own works?
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The only reason that "moral rights" is an issue is its inclusion in the statutes of various countries. It mostly stems from an inflated Napoleonic view of the Rights of Man that was meant to replace the divine rights of kings. Common law countries have been loath to embark in this direction. Moral rights are mentioned in the US law, but only as a toothless tiger.
I would actually be interested to get the background for this interpretation of how moral rights came to happen as a legal idea. If there are such references.
I couldn't find the reference that I recalled from a couple of years ago, but I did find some reference to the idea at http://www.ams.org/ewing/Documents/CopyrightandAuthors-70.pdf in the section "Some philosophy".
There are profound differences at a very deep level between the rights of authors in civil law countries and the right to copy in common law countries. In common law countries copyright has been primarily an economic right instead of a personal right. It used to be that copyright disputes were framed between two publishers or between publisher and author. To the extent that the law was a balance between interests it was the interests of publishers and authors that were being balanced. That the using public could have interests was unthinkable because these users flew below the radar of cost effectiveness. If it was not economical for a person to infringe copyrights in the first place, how could it be worthwhile to lobby politicians to have these rights for the general using public. Today we have a third party whose interests were never considered in the balance.
Aye, that is the rub. We aren't really in the job for just helping different regimes interoperate. (if I am allowed my sly aside - some of are trying to pull a fast one to prevent interoperability)
The important thing is, if this change of attribution *does* in fact go forward, there is no option of saying it was done out of ignorance. There have been a number of people who have spelled out the real legal issues involved. If they are ignored, rather than addressed, that is the responsibility of those doing it, not an apathetic community which did not point out that those issues were real. We have pointed out those issues, and if they are ignored, there is no way it can be blamed on an apathetic community who "allowed" it to happen.
Particularly as the legal reasons in at least Finnish legal manuals for laymen who have to deal with moral rights seem to focus on the utility moral rights have in terms of protecting the artisans reputation as being good at his craft.
I don't know anything about the history of Finnish jurisprudence, but that statement seems to draw on the French model. Canada has provisions for moral rights, but the person claiming that his reputation has been damaged would have the burden of proving that as well as proving the amount of damages. If one made a claim for $1,000,000 in damages he shouldn't expect that it will be granted just because he says so.
Actually there is a more profound difference of legal systems at work. Finland works on the assumption that claims of damages are not paramount, but protections given by law are. So you can be fined, even if you cause no damage. On the other hand, no ridiculous claims of damage will give the aggrieved party an inflated compensation claim, because the Finnish system is not geared towards rewarding the victim, but only assuring everybodys rights are protected.
I have great difficulty understanding how the "right to examine" could be traced to some grandiose "Rights of Man" basis, since the argument presented for this particular moral right is clearly grounded on protecting the artisan/artists ability to examine their earlier work, to remind them self and refresh their memory on methods they had employed on those works, and thus enable them to not lose skills and methods they had mastered in earlier days.
I seem to be misunderstanding something about your stated "right to examine". Is someone claiming that authors are prevented from examining their own works?
The right to examine is a Moral Right that I feel really does not fit with your over-arching idea that they are aggrandizing rights and not only utilitarian ones.
If you made a sculpture and sold it off, in many countries without moral rights, that would be the end of it. Hey, you were hired to do a job, what more do you want!?
In Finland, you used some useful skills you had gained from apprenticeship, and study at art colleges, and even perhaps a sojourn in Paris or Venice. And you may have even made some hard decisions forced on you by the material you were sculpting itself. Wow!
Now, picture yourself as the artist some 15 years later.
You are at the doddering limits of decrepitude, but you still have enough wits to remember you had to make some hard choices then. A mesenate asks you to make one last work in that same material. You go and knock on the door of the person who bought your sculpture.
Under the moral rights "right to examine", the owner of the sculpture could not turn you away from their door. They would have to let you see the original work, no matter if you had used it as a door-stop or as a bedroom ornament.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 5:39 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
2009/1/24 Anthony wikimail@inbox.org: >
My point of view is that the proposed license update is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. If Mike is going to deny that moral rights exist in the first place, then I feel the need to explain that they do.
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On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 7:18 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
David, I think there are many people (myself included) who think that goes too far.
Personally, I care whether or not reusers attempt to follow the spirit of the copyleft and make their changes and contributions available for future reuse. If we wanted to be truly free, we would all license our work into the public domain, but instead we work under a copyleft and I consider honoring that distinction to be important.
-Robert Rohde
On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jan 24, 2009 at 7:18 PM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
Well said - I couldn't agree more.
Personally, I care whether or not reusers attempt to follow the spirit of the copyleft and make their changes and contributions available for future reuse.
You're mixing issues - nobody has a problem with 'follow[ing] the spirit of the copyleft', it's making them jump through arbitrary hoops to do so that is the problem.
If we wanted to be truly free, we would all license our work into the public domain, but instead we work under a copyleft and I consider honoring that distinction to be important.
Nobody is suggesting otherwise. There are plenty of good reasons not to use public domain and I for one certainly value the 'protection' of CC-BY-SA without the 'exclusion' of detailed (yet meaningless) attributions.
Sam
David Goodman wrote:
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
Precisely! To a large extent, we are effectively releasing our work into the public domain, except for the fact that in some countries this is not allowed. Also, putting a work into the public domain means abandoning our rights of action in the event that there is infringement on that public ownership. There is no custodian of the public domain to take action when the copyrights of the general public have been infringed.
I have no complaints about commercial use, but I am concerned when a commercial user massively takes freely licensed or public domain material and parks them under the umbrella of his copyrights so that the users of "his" material unwittingly respect a copyright that has no basis in fact. If the only ones with rights of action against the fraudster are the separate owners of the fragments, we will have loosed the tactic of divide and conquer upon our own selves. I would really like to see a situation where we nominating someone as an non-exclusive agent with the right to prosecute serious copyright violations on a class action basis.
I choose to edit with a pseudonym, though my real name is certainly well known to the community. My self-esteem is not so week that I need to be publicly credited for every last edit that I make, the satisfaction of a job well-done is its own reward. We do not own the articles, and we edit each others' work mercilessly. Having a long list of names in 2-point type just so that the individual editor can see his name in print is wasteful and contrary to the spirit of our collective effort. This is not what credit and attribution is about. Expecting anything more from the downstream user than to say that he took things from Wikipedia is unrealistic.
Ec
On Saturday 31 January 2009 11:23:33 Ray Saintonge wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
Precisely! To a large extent, we are effectively releasing our work into the public domain, except for the fact that in some countries this
No, we are not, and it is ridiculous to even think that. First of all, I would most certainly not work on Wikipedia or any similar project if that would mean that my work is put in the public domain.
is not allowed. Also, putting a work into the public domain means abandoning our rights of action in the event that there is infringement
No, it does not. Even if we have had put our work in public domain, in most jurisdictions we would still retain our moral rights. No one would be allowed to claim to be the author, for example.
on that public ownership. There is no custodian of the public domain to take action when the copyrights of the general public have been infringed.
Yes, there is. For example, Copyright law of Serbia explicitly specifies (Article 56) that author's heirs, associations of authors and scientific and art institutions are entitled to protect moral rights of the authors.
edit each others' work mercilessly. Having a long list of names in 2-point type just so that the individual editor can see his name in print is wasteful and contrary to the spirit of our collective effort.
It is not having editors' names anywhere that is wasteful and contrary to the spirit of our collective effort. People are doing what they are because they take pride of what they do. If people are not properly credited, fewer people will work on the projects. If people are not properly credited, they will care less about their reputation and write worse. There is absolutely nothing to gain, and a number of things to lose from not crediting the authors.
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism.
On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Saturday 31 January 2009 11:23:33 Ray Saintonge wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
Precisely! To a large extent, we are effectively releasing our work into the public domain, except for the fact that in some countries this
No, we are not, and it is ridiculous to even think that. First of all, I would most certainly not work on Wikipedia or any similar project if that would mean that my work is put in the public domain.
is not allowed. Also, putting a work into the public domain means abandoning our rights of action in the event that there is infringement
No, it does not. Even if we have had put our work in public domain, in most jurisdictions we would still retain our moral rights. No one would be allowed to claim to be the author, for example.
on that public ownership. There is no custodian of the public domain to take action when the copyrights of the general public have been infringed.
Yes, there is. For example, Copyright law of Serbia explicitly specifies (Article 56) that author's heirs, associations of authors and scientific and art institutions are entitled to protect moral rights of the authors.
edit each others' work mercilessly. Having a long list of names in 2-point type just so that the individual editor can see his name in print is wasteful and contrary to the spirit of our collective effort.
It is not having editors' names anywhere that is wasteful and contrary to the spirit of our collective effort. People are doing what they are because they take pride of what they do. If people are not properly credited, fewer people will work on the projects. If people are not properly credited, they will care less about their reputation and write worse. There is absolutely nothing to gain, and a number of things to lose from not crediting the authors. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
David Goodman wrote:
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism.
It is a bit ego-centric to only care about how one self only views ones work as mattering. It is wise and pragmatic to acknowledge that not every individual thinks as one thinks themselves. That is pluralism.
I don't myself care too much about being attributed (which is one of the reasons for a long time I just did IP-based edits), but I certainly will defend to the utmost anyones right to feel pride from name-recognition.
Given that not that many books in the world are published anonymously, clearly this approach to ones name is far from exceptional.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Hoi, Because their narcissism gets in the way of what we want to achieve perhaps ? Thanks, GerardM
2009/2/1 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu
On Sunday 01 February 2009 07:14:44 David Goodman wrote:
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's
narcissism.
You say that as if it is a bad thing. Why turn off narcissistic people if work they do is useful?
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2009/2/1 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wisely remarked:
You say that as if it is a bad thing. Why turn off narcissistic people if work they do is useful?
Gerard Meijssen top-posted:
Hoi, Because their narcissism gets in the way of what we want to achieve perhaps ?
This would seem to suggest that what "we" want to achieve is *not* "producing an encyclopedia". I suggest you reconsider.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Hoi, No, we want to create a free encyclopaedia. The restrictions imposed for narcissistic reasons do get in the way of making the encyclopaedia Free. Thanks. GerardM
2009/2/1 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com
2009/2/1 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wisely remarked:
You say that as if it is a bad thing. Why turn off narcissistic people
if
work they do is useful?
Gerard Meijssen top-posted:
Hoi, Because their narcissism gets in the way of what we want to achieve
perhaps
?
This would seem to suggest that what "we" want to achieve is *not* "producing an encyclopedia". I suggest you reconsider.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, No, we want to create a free encyclopaedia. The restrictions imposed for narcissistic reasons do get in the way of making the encyclopaedia Free. Thanks.
People may be contributing for narcissistic reasons, but nobody has suggested any restrictions be imposed for narcissistic reasons. What people have been worried about are real laws in different jurisdictions, which have absolutely nothing to do with narcissism.
Ignoring those laws will be a greater detriment to making the encyclopedia Free, since it means the content could only be completely Freely used in the US and jurisdictions that have precisely compatible legal frameworks.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 12:53 PM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Sunday 01 February 2009 10:22:23 Gerard Meijssen wrote:
No, we want to create a free encyclopaedia. The restrictions imposed for narcissistic reasons do get in the way of making the encyclopaedia Free.
No, they don't. Please, show how they do.
By way of example, I am currently working on a short (8 slide), clean presentation, to be licensed under a free license. It contains a slide with 8 thumbnail photos of generic pictures (a house, a building, a government chamber, a few racks in a datacenter, etc.) and a few samples of text. It also contains a picture of one of the original google racks which would be less easy to replace. Some of the photos have been transformed by others so there are multiple authors.
By imposing the attribution requirements (indeed even linking to individual articles rather than Wikipedia itself) you are making it significantly more difficult for me to make use of the work and more likely that I will 'take my business elsewhere'. That damages the community and thus the (apparently egotistical) needs of the few threaten to impose on the needs of many (both within our community and the general public as a whole).
This type of piecemeal reuse/'remixing' is typical to that of an encyclopedia - for example in your average school project. The authors each contributed a small part to individual works which eventually became even smaller parts of a larger work. Their contribution at the end of the day is negligible and if they feel the need to have school kids quoting their name to teachers and the like then I suggest they would be better served by the various communities that cater for this 'need'.
Sam
2009/2/1 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
By way of example, I am currently working on a short (8 slide), clean presentation, to be licensed under a free license. It contains a slide with 8 thumbnail photos of generic pictures (a house, a building, a government chamber, a few racks in a datacenter, etc.) and a few samples of text. It also contains a picture of one of the original google racks which would be less easy to replace. Some of the photos have been transformed by others so there are multiple authors.
I doubt there are that many authors and crediting photo authors is not a major challenge. Indeed in many cases wikipedia would be the long option ("geni" is shorter than "wikipedia").
By imposing the attribution requirements (indeed even linking to individual articles rather than Wikipedia itself) you are making it significantly more difficult for me to make use of the work and more likely that I will 'take my business elsewhere'.
Feel free to do so. Getty and Corbis will cost you say $100.
That damages the community and thus the (apparently egotistical) needs of the few threaten to impose on the needs of many (both within our community and the general public as a whole).
Evidences?
This type of piecemeal reuse/'remixing' is typical to that of an encyclopedia - for example in your average school project.
Your average school project is then a copyvio.
The authors each contributed a small part to individual works which eventually became even smaller parts of a larger work. Their contribution at the end of the day is negligible and if they feel the need to have school kids quoting their name to teachers and the like then I suggest they would be better served by the various communities that cater for this 'need'.
This is what fair use and fair dealing is for. South Korea also has exceptions.
Hoi, We are discussing all kinds of "arguments" around the license change from GFDL to CC-by-sa. I am not impressed at all by the quality of the arguments. It seems to me that there are two trains of thought. There are the people who want THEIR attribution and who will come up with every conceivable and inconceivable argument to get as much personal exposure as possible. On the other hand there are the people who do not care that much about their attribution, they care more for interoperability, they want to have the best license that will ENABLE cooperation and collaboration.
So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this. I have only heard a lot of FUD that I qualify as narcistic. FUD that does not contribute to more FREE colloaboration and re-use. I can understand why the shared alike part is deemed to be important. I can understand why commercial organisations are not free to just use material in any context. But that is all beside the point because it applies equally to either license.
The one argument against the CC-by-sa that takes the prize is the notion that we will have less influence with Creative Commons ... yet another great narcissistic argument.
When you ask why narcissism should not have a place, it is quite simple; the world does not resolve around you (or me for that matter). Thanks, GerardM
2009/2/1 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu
On Sunday 01 February 2009 10:22:23 Gerard Meijssen wrote:
No, we want to create a free encyclopaedia. The restrictions imposed for narcissistic reasons do get in the way of making the encyclopaedia Free.
No, they don't. Please, show how they do.
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2009/2/1 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this.
It can but can only do this when everyone agrees. Since wikipedia currently has 282,180,603 edits by people who have not agreed such a change is imposible.
I have only heard a lot of FUD that I qualify as narcistic. FUD that does not contribute to more FREE colloaboration and re-use.
I understand license text and copyright law can be considered FUD by some however it is FUD that is important.
The one argument against the CC-by-sa that takes the prize is the notion that we will have less influence with Creative Commons ... yet another great narcissistic argument.
Not really. The fact is experience shows that every free license has issues (for example CC-BY-SA 3.0 contains an invariant section clause although I doubt that was CC's intention). Wikipedia by it's very nature tends to hit these issues before anyone else. Having influence means we in theory have a better chance of getting such issues fixed.
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:29 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this.
It can but can only do this when everyone agrees. Since wikipedia currently has 282,180,603 edits by people who have not agreed such a change is imposible.
False. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and the [edits of the] minority who choose to disrupt the community will be quickly and efficiently purged from it (albeit wasting resources in the process that could have been better utilised elsewhere).
It is clear that there is a small but vocal minority intent on spreading 'important' FUD and in my opinion these people can't see the forest for the trees. Fortunately it seems the leadership has a good grasp on community sentiment and sanity will prevail, with any luck sooner rather than later.
Sam
2009/2/2 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
False. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and the [edits of the] minority who choose to disrupt the community will be quickly and efficiently purged from it (albeit wasting resources in the process that could have been better utilised elsewhere).
I'm not talking about needs I'm talking about legal rights.
Remember you can't use presumed consent in this situation so if you wanted to shift the credit to wikipedia you would need to track down and get agreement from every author (and whoever inherited in the cases where they have died). Given the amount of content we have from very occasional contributers this is impossible.
It is clear that there is a small but vocal minority intent on spreading 'important' FUD and in my opinion these people can't see the forest for the trees.
Please provide a halfway legal way to do what you propose. And no moveing wikipedia to Afghanistan is not a valid answer.
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 3:58 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not talking about needs I'm talking about legal rights.
Remember you can't use presumed consent in this situation so if you wanted to shift the credit to wikipedia you would need to track down and get agreement from every author (and whoever inherited in the cases where they have died). Given the amount of content we have from very occasional contributers this is impossible.
Nothing's impossible - where there's a will (and clearly there is[1]) there's a way. Mozilla managed to relicense to GPL years ago[2] (they had an FAQ too[3]) and there's long been talk about moving the Linux kernel from GPLv2 to GPLv3[4].
These moves are not easy and can be made significantly more difficult by individuals (like yourself) working against the spirit of the community. As Mozilla said in the FAQ, "by doing so you will make [the work] useful to more people, which may result in others improving [the work] to make it more useful to you", before going on to explain that the 'spirit' of the new license was in line with that of the old.
The key difference is that they had only 450 contributors and the vast majority were contactable. We have orders of magnitude more contributors, many of whom are anonymous, aliased and/or without contact details. The best we can do in this case is contact those who we can, notify those who connect to the site and publish a notice of our intentions.
So let's get this show on the road... there's been more than enough compelling debate, academic wankery and downright noise already. Those who are so concerned about the opinion others hold of them and feel their right to self-aggrandisement is being trampled on can identify themselves (and their edits) so as the rest of us can get on with doing what we set out to do - building the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Sam
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Transition_to_CC-BY-SA#Discussio... 2. http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=4155 3. http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html 4. http://www.fsfe.org/en/fellows/ciaran/ciaran_s_free_software_notes/about_gpl...
2009/2/2 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
Nothing's impossible - where there's a will (and clearly there is[1]) there's a way. Mozilla managed to relicense to GPL years ago[2] (they had an FAQ too[3])
"We have sought and obtained permission to relicense from almost everyone who contributed code to Mozilla up until the date of the new licensing policy on September 19th 2001. (After that date, contribution of code was contingent on giving permission to relicense, if the code was not immediately checked into a tri-licensed file.) Once we have obtained responses from all the individuals, companies and organisations concerned, we will relicense those files for which we have received permission from all copyright holders."
If you think you can get permission from every wikipedia editor you are free to try.
These moves are not easy and can be made significantly more difficult by individuals (like yourself)
Nah. I'm a minor issue compared to the people who have been inconsiderate enough to die
working against the spirit of the community.
We are discussing copyright issues ad homs are unhelpful.
As Mozilla said in the FAQ, "by doing so you will make [the work] useful to more people, which may result in others improving [the work] to make it more useful to you", before going on to explain that the 'spirit' of the new license was in line with that of the old.
The key difference is that they had only 450 contributors and the vast majority were contactable. We have orders of magnitude more contributors, many of whom are anonymous, aliased and/or without contact details. The best we can do in this case is contact those who we can, notify those who connect to the site and publish a notice of our intentions.
The "best we can do" isn't then enough to meet the requirements of the law.
So let's get this show on the road... there's been more than enough compelling debate, academic wankery and downright noise already.
The past actions of those such as User:Ram-Man make it quite clear that you are free to ask wikipedians to relicense their content under any license terms you wish. See [[template:DualLicenseWithCC-BySA-Tri-2.5]]
Those who are so concerned about the opinion others hold of them and feel their right to self-aggrandisement is being trampled on can identify themselves (and their edits) so as the rest of us can get on with doing what we set out to do - building the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
I've known people argue that "anyone" should include those living under Napoleonic code legal systems.
If you want to license your edits so that people can credit you with a ref to wikipedia feel free to do so. Just don't try and carry out such a change in the case of those who have not actively agreed to it.
Sam Johnston wrote:
It is clear that there is a small but vocal minority intent on spreading 'important' FUD and in my opinion these people can't see the forest for the trees. Fortunately it seems the leadership has a good grasp on community sentiment and sanity will prevail, with any luck sooner rather than later.
The only one spreading FUD here is you. It is you who continue to insist that distributing the knowledge while properly crediting the authors is impossible (fear), without giving any evidence for that. You are also the one who claims that formal copyright problems are not that important (uncertainty), while there exist valid concerns that they are. You are also the one who claim that your opponents are a small but vocal minority (doubt), again without a shred of evidence.
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
We are discussing all kinds of "arguments" around the license change from GFDL to CC-by-sa. I am not impressed at all by the quality of the arguments. It seems to me that there are two trains of thought. There are the people who want THEIR attribution and who will come up with every conceivable and inconceivable argument to get as much personal exposure as possible. On the other hand there are the people who do not care that much about their attribution, they care more for interoperability, they want to have the best license that will ENABLE cooperation and collaboration.
I don't think the trains of thought are that easily separated, but that's a great observation.
Not entirely relevant given the constraints of this discussion (the license update one), but it's an interesting question whether legally required attribution gets one closer to "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." In another context (scientific data), CC (its Science Commons project) decided the answer is definitely no, see http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/. Separately, in addition to seeing if there are ways CC licenses can be improved to facilitate attribution in the context of massively collaborative works, I'd like to see the eventual next version clarify how one can waive attribution (CC stopped versioning licenses without BY long ago for good simplicity and interoperability reasons). Acknowledging again that this discussion is constrained, it is great to see consideration of attribution in light of the needs of free knowledge.
So far I have not heard any arguments why the CC-by-sa cannot do this. I have only heard a lot of FUD that I qualify as narcistic. FUD that does not contribute to more FREE colloaboration and re-use. I can understand why the shared alike part is deemed to be important. I can understand why commercial organisations are not free to just use material in any context. But that is all beside the point because it applies equally to either license.
Just in case crazy people read the second to last sentence above in the future -- neither license puts special restrictions on users based on their nature, organizational or not, commercial or not. :-)
The one argument against the CC-by-sa that takes the prize is the notion that we will have less influence with Creative Commons ... yet another great narcissistic argument.
I don't think that argument is narcissistic at all. Wikimedians either need lots of influence or very strong reason to believe that the steward of whatever license used is going to preserve the license as a vehicle for promoting the goal of free knowledge. I think that with CC BY-SA you'll get both, but I'm pretty biased, working for CC.
Mike
On Sunday 01 February 2009 09:15:28 Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Because their narcissism gets in the way of what we want to achieve perhaps ?
How come?
2009/2/1 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu
On Sunday 01 February 2009 07:14:44 David Goodman wrote:
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's
narcissism.
You say that as if it is a bad thing. Why turn off narcissistic people if work they do is useful?
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism.
You should probably clarify what it is you're calling "narcissism". For that matter, you should probably clarify what you mean by "narcissism" in the first place. A common dictionary definition is "excessive self-love". But as a philosophical concept that's quite incomplete. What constitutes "excessive"? What is the "proper" amount of self-love? And why does wanting or not wanting your name to be on a work throw one over that threshold?
In any case, I find it hard to see how, in this particular context, you could be proud of your work but not at least prefer your name to be on it. If you've achieved something of great value to yourself and to others, isn't it better for you, and for everyone, if people know you achieved it?
This is not to say that there might not be circumstances where you're willing to not have your name on your work, or, indeed, where for some reason you wish to remain anonymous. But I think there's an inherent validity in the desire to be named in a work you produced in at least some circumstances which arise in Wikimedia projects. I certainly wouldn't categorically dismiss that desire as "narcissism" (which may or may not be what you intended to do above).
Anthony wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, David Goodman wrote
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism.
In any case, I find it hard to see how, in this particular context, you could be proud of your work but not at least prefer your name to be on it. If you've achieved something of great value to yourself and to others, isn't it better for you, and for everyone, if people know you achieved it?
I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins.
I think there's an inherent validity in the desire to be named in a work you produced in at least some circumstances which arise in Wikimedia projects.
Then let's predefine those circumstances.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins.
And yet, the church has no problem attributing good works to saints by name.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins.
And yet, the church has no problem attributing good works to saints by name.
The difference here is that the church is making these gratuitous attributions. The saints themselves are too dead to be bothered.
Ec
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, David Goodman wrote
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's
narcissism.
In any case, I find it hard to see how, in this particular context, you could be proud of your work but not at least prefer your name to be on
it.
If you've achieved something of great value to yourself and to others,
isn't
it better for you, and for everyone, if people know you achieved it?
I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins.
Well, David said he *is* proud of his work, so your "seven deadly sins" argument apparently isn't the one he was resting on. As for how sharing your name is better for everyone, I think it's fairly clear that a work of non-fiction is better if you know who wrote it, and further I think it's also clear that when someone creates a great work it is beneficial to know who created it so that one can find more works by that person. So that's how it benefits society. How it benefits the individual is even more obvious, to the point that I don't even think I have to explain it.
As I said, there are certainly exceptions to this, but in general I think it holds, and even if it held in only some cases I think that would be enough to protect the right.
I think there's an inherent validity in the desire to be named in a work you produced in at least
some
circumstances which arise in Wikimedia projects.
Then let's predefine those circumstances.
The "pre" in predefine implies that you're not changing the rules after the fact. And if you're not interested in changing the rules after the fact, then there's no reason to change the license.
Anthony wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote
Anthony wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, David Goodman wrote
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism.
In any case, I find it hard to see how, in this particular context, you could be proud of your work but not at least prefer your name to be on it.
If you've achieved something of great value to yourself and to others, isn't
it better for you, and for everyone, if people know you achieved it?
I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins.
Well, David said he *is* proud of his work, so your "seven deadly sins" argument apparently isn't the one he was resting on. As for how sharing your name is better for everyone, I think it's fairly clear that a work of non-fiction is better if you know who wrote it, and further I think it's also clear that when someone creates a great work it is beneficial to know who created it so that one can find more works by that person. So that's how it benefits society.
I wouldn't want to suggest that David was a fallen angel.
Whether you know who wrote a work or not it's still the same work. It's a non-sequitur to draw the conclusion that you do. Following your line of reasoning we should all bow down before the Encyclopedia Britannica and give up Wikipedia because EB is better. Sure, a person who likes the works of a particular author will seek out more of his works, but that can be much more about better marketing than a better book. Where's the benefit to society.
How it benefits the individual is even more obvious, to the point that I don't even think I have to explain it.
We don't really have a difference about benefit to the individual.
Ec
So where do things stand?
By my rough count, the relicensing discussion has generated over 300 emails in the last month alone. At least within the limited confines of people who read this list, I suspect that everyone who has wanted to offer an opinion has done so. While, I mean no disrespect, much of what continues to be said strikes me as either repetitious of prior comments or simply off-topic.
Given that, I would like to ask Erik, Mike, or someone else with the WMF to comment on what the timetable and process for the next step will be? At the start of January, the BIG VOTE was tentatively scheduled to start February 9th. Is that still accurate, or have we talked ourselves into a delay? Will there be any more expansive effort to communicate with the various communities before the vote starts?
Thanks.
-Robert Rohde
Robert Rohde wrote:
So where do things stand?
By my rough count, the relicensing discussion has generated over 300 emails in the last month alone. At least within the limited confines of people who read this list, I suspect that everyone who has wanted to offer an opinion has done so. While, I mean no disrespect, much of what continues to be said strikes me as either repetitious of prior comments or simply off-topic.
I very much agree. Certainly anything *I* wish to add, is very much best left off-list.
Given that, I would like to ask Erik, Mike, or someone else with the WMF to comment on what the timetable and process for the next step will be? At the start of January, the BIG VOTE was tentatively scheduled to start February 9th. Is that still accurate, or have we talked ourselves into a delay? Will there be any more expansive effort to communicate with the various communities before the vote starts?
Just put a move on; is what I say.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:> As for how sharing
your name is better for everyone, I think it's fairly clear that a work
of
non-fiction is better if you know who wrote it, and further I think it's also clear that when someone creates a great work it is beneficial to
know
who created it so that one can find more works by that person. So that's how it benefits society.
Whether you know who wrote a work or not it's still the same work.
Maybe, but if a work lists its authors it's not the same work as if it doesn't.
Following your line of reasoning we should all bow down before the Encyclopedia Britannica and give up Wikipedia because EB is better.
Absolutely not. EB has not adapted its model to the Internet at all, and it's very unlikely it will. Just because there are some things EB does better doesn't mean it is overall better.
Unless they decided to radically change their model and start over from scratch, EB will never be the size of Wikipedia. It will never be as up-to-date as Wikipedia. No, with regard to lack of attribution I think Wikipedia has to worry much more about Knol than EB. Of course, Wikipedia has about a 7 1/2 year head start on Knol. Pure momentum might be enough for it to win that race, if all you care about is being better than your nearest competitor.
Sure, a person who likes the works of a particular author will seek out more of his works, but that can be much more about better marketing than a better book. Where's the benefit to society.
Where's the benefit to society in marketing? It's only because of marketing that many of the products you use can be made, and this is especially true with intellectual products, which benefit tremendously from economies of scale. As you youself imply, just having a better book isn't enough. You have to convince people to try your better book. Life doesn't work like the Field of Dreams. Honestly promoting your work when you've done a great job benefits everyone.
But since most of the contributors to Wikipedia are anonymous, this is one thing we do not and will never know, regardless of licensing. so to the extent Wikipedia has any authority it's precisely from the fact of community editing on a non-personal basis. Yes, within Wikipedia it's valuable to know who contributed what , and how the interplay of people (or pseudo-people) takes place. For the evaluation of Wikipedia from outside, it stands, for better or worse, on the quality of the community editing.
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:47 AM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Anthony wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 7:21 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote
Anthony wrote:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, David Goodman wrote
I am proud of my work, not of my name being on my work. that's narcissism.
In any case, I find it hard to see how, in this particular context, you could be proud of your work but not at least prefer your name to be on it.
If you've achieved something of great value to yourself and to others, isn't
it better for you, and for everyone, if people know you achieved it?
I guess that some of us are nothing more than unrepentant altruists. We believe that free works belong to everybody. If something is of great value to you don't need for anyone to tell you that; you already know it. How does knowing that you produced something make the idea any better or worse than it would be without that knowledge. How is knowing that you did it better for everyone? Pride, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins.
Well, David said he *is* proud of his work, so your "seven deadly sins" argument apparently isn't the one he was resting on. As for how sharing your name is better for everyone, I think it's fairly clear that a work of non-fiction is better if you know who wrote it, and further I think it's also clear that when someone creates a great work it is beneficial to know who created it so that one can find more works by that person. So that's how it benefits society.
I wouldn't want to suggest that David was a fallen angel.
Whether you know who wrote a work or not it's still the same work. It's a non-sequitur to draw the conclusion that you do. Following your line of reasoning we should all bow down before the Encyclopedia Britannica and give up Wikipedia because EB is better. Sure, a person who likes the works of a particular author will seek out more of his works, but that can be much more about better marketing than a better book. Where's the benefit to society.
How it benefits the individual is even more obvious, to the point that I don't even think I have to explain it.
We don't really have a difference about benefit to the individual.
Ec
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One thing that has not been brought forward yet in this discussion, and which I think is important, is that 'author' does not equate 'editor'. It seems many here do go from that assumption in trying to get the authors of an article. Suppose, an article has the following edit history:
A starts the page with some text B adds some text to it C notes that A's text was a copyright violation, and adds a template to that effect D removes all the text of the page (because A's text is a copyright violations, and B's edits make no sense without it), and replaces it by a translation from another Wikipedia Some vandal vandalizes the page E reverses the vandalism F adds some interwikis G corrects 2 spelling mistakes H adds a paragraph I adds a picture from Commons.
The _editors_ of the page are A to I and the vandal. But are they also the authors? I think not. In my opinion the _authors_ are D, H, the authors of the translated article and the author of the picture.
Having said that, my opinion on this is that I do want to be credited, but only where my contributions are really major. Not where I made a 'non-authorship' edit, and also not where I made a substantial but still relatively small edit, for example adding one line to an already extensive article. The first I don't consider authorship, and the second I'd be more than happy to be credited as part of "wikipedia editors". But where a page is essentially written by me with only insubstantial (though useful) edits by others before and after, I do want to see my name as the maker or one of the makers. Thus, I'd like to see some credits similar to the "main credits place" in GFDL, where a few of the major authors are mentioned, plus "other Wikipedia editors" or something similar.
But here's the virtue of contributing to Wikipedia in the first place: anyone anywhere who wants to see who did what, will go to the actual Wikipedia and will find your credited contributions, regardless of the details in subsequent reproductions--as long as they know it's from Wikipedia.
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Andre Engels andreengels@gmail.com wrote:
One thing that has not been brought forward yet in this discussion, and which I think is important, is that 'author' does not equate 'editor'. It seems many here do go from that assumption in trying to get the authors of an article. Suppose, an article has the following edit history:
A starts the page with some text B adds some text to it C notes that A's text was a copyright violation, and adds a template to that effect D removes all the text of the page (because A's text is a copyright violations, and B's edits make no sense without it), and replaces it by a translation from another Wikipedia Some vandal vandalizes the page E reverses the vandalism F adds some interwikis G corrects 2 spelling mistakes H adds a paragraph I adds a picture from Commons.
The _editors_ of the page are A to I and the vandal. But are they also the authors? I think not. In my opinion the _authors_ are D, H, the authors of the translated article and the author of the picture.
Having said that, my opinion on this is that I do want to be credited, but only where my contributions are really major. Not where I made a 'non-authorship' edit, and also not where I made a substantial but still relatively small edit, for example adding one line to an already extensive article. The first I don't consider authorship, and the second I'd be more than happy to be credited as part of "wikipedia editors". But where a page is essentially written by me with only insubstantial (though useful) edits by others before and after, I do want to see my name as the maker or one of the makers. Thus, I'd like to see some credits similar to the "main credits place" in GFDL, where a few of the major authors are mentioned, plus "other Wikipedia editors" or something similar.
-- André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
David Goodman wrote:
My view is that any restriction of distribution that is not absolutely and unquestionably legally necessary is a violation of the moral rights of the contributors. We contributed to a free encyclopedia, in the sense that the material could be used freely--and widely. We all explicitly agreed there could be commercial use, and most of us did not particularly concern ourselves with how other commercial or noncommercial sites would use or license the material, as long as what we put on Wikipedia could be used by anyone.
Precisely! To a large extent, we are effectively releasing our work into the public domain, except for the fact that in some countries this is not allowed. Also, putting a work into the public domain means abandoning our rights of action in the event that there is infringement on that public ownership. There is no custodian of the public domain to take action when the copyrights of the general public have been infringed.
This is an important point. It is precisely why it is not a good idea to remove attribution. Because just as releasing into public domain is not allowed in many jurisdictions, equally removing attribution willy-nilly is not allowed in many jurisdictions.
If we were removing attribution like that, the problems would be nearly of the same order as from releasing it all to PD. Moving modified content from one jurisdiction to another would become a nightmare.
Specifically in the case of CC-BY-SA my understanding is that any provisions it has for not honouring the moral rights laws of those jurisdictions where they are active, would only be useful, if one were working on a project that never wanted it to be realistically usefully re-used in such jurisdictions; which, again in my understanding, Wikimedia is not.
...[snip]..
I choose to edit with a pseudonym, though my real name is certainly well known to the community. My self-esteem is not so week that I need to be publicly credited for every last edit that I make, the satisfaction of a job well-done is its own reward. We do not own the articles, and we edit each others' work mercilessly. Having a long list of names in 2-point type just so that the individual editor can see his name in print is wasteful and contrary to the spirit of our collective effort. This is not what credit and attribution is about. Expecting anything more from the downstream user than to say that he took things from Wikipedia is unrealistic.
Ec
Heh. I call your pseudonymous editing, and raise you: "I like to edit anonymously occasionally."
See my paragraphs above. We do want to have our content to be useful within the parameters of as many jurisdictions as the CC-BY-SA license allows, clearly, and the laws of many jurisdictions are clearly not satisfied with crediting Wikipedia. Or at the very least, the arguments why they would be thus satisfied, have not been spelled out on this mailing list. There *has* been an _assertion_ that legal people have been consulted, and based on this some people *think* such could be defended; but this has been disputed by multiple parties.
For that matter. Wikipedia certainly gets no warm fuzzies from receiving credit, so why should it be credited at all, and not just its contributors - purely from the "reason" of "giving credit where is credit is due" point of view.
The only reason you would have for crediting wikipedia would be because you accepted that fundamentally its contributors deserved some credit for the work, if the mention was done merely for reasons of giving credit; and not other reasons such as allowing verification or the like.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
This is an important point. It is precisely why it is not a good idea to remove attribution.
I wasn't aware that anyone was suggesting that we remove attribution altogether, just that we attribute Wikipedia as a whole for the sake of everyone's sanity, and in consideration of the extremely limited (if not negative) value that such mass attributions provide.
While working for a large US software company I never received (nor expected) any credit whatsoever for my work. You might argue that I was well remunerated for my efforts, but when I wrote network quotas for the Linux kernel (where they have lived happily for the last decade or so) my name didn't start popping up in the boot messages either. Yes you can find it if you look at the source code or edit logs but I don't care - my contribution was in the name of the community.
Sam
2009/2/1 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
I wasn't aware that anyone was suggesting that we remove attribution altogether, just that we attribute Wikipedia as a whole for the sake of everyone's sanity, and in consideration of the extremely limited (if not negative) value that such mass attributions provide.
That would legally prevent us from importing any material first published outside wikipedia. It would also legally prevent us from using any material that is currently in wikipedia or added to wikipedia before this switchover.
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I have no complaints about commercial use, but I am concerned when a commercial user massively takes freely licensed or public domain material and parks them under the umbrella of his copyrights so that the users of "his" material unwittingly respect a copyright that has no basis in fact. If the only ones with rights of action against the fraudster are the separate owners of the fragments, we will have loosed the tactic of divide and conquer upon our own selves. I would really like to see a situation where we nominating someone as an non-exclusive agent with the right to prosecute serious copyright violations on a class action basis.
Is it possible to make this work for copy-left licenses? That is can one transfer even partially the right to seek redress to another party? If so, that would be wonderful. I am sure many contributors would take the advantage of it.
To be most careful, I would suggest that such party would be legally differentiated from the Foundation, and would accept on an equal basis such nominations from contributors to non-WMF projects as well. Specifically since - at least in theory - the agent might be requested to act against the Foundations stated interests.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I have no complaints about commercial use, but I am concerned when a commercial user massively takes freely licensed or public domain material and parks them under the umbrella of his copyrights so that the users of "his" material unwittingly respect a copyright that has no basis in fact. If the only ones with rights of action against the fraudster are the separate owners of the fragments, we will have loosed the tactic of divide and conquer upon our own selves. I would really like to see a situation where we nominate someone as an non-exclusive agent with the right to prosecute serious copyright violations on a class action basis.
Is it possible to make this work for copy-left licenses? That is can one transfer even partially the right to seek redress to another party? If so, that would be wonderful. I am sure many contributors would take the advantage of it.
It should be. In the same way one appoints a lawyer to pursue one's case in court instead of doing so personally. The lawyer who launches a case does not do so because his own personal rights have been violated. The case here would not really be about seeking redress. We who write for the Wiki projects do not do so for direct financial gain, so we should not expect to receive such gain through a lawsuit. Any distribution of the proceeds of a successful lawsuit would be mostly symbolic.
For me it all comes down to regarding what is in the public domain as belonging to everyone instead of no-one. Protecting the public domain then becomes a question of collective rights.
To be most careful, I would suggest that such party would be legally differentiated from the Foundation, and would accept on an equal basis such nominations from contributors to non-WMF projects as well. Specifically since - at least in theory - the agent might be requested to act against the Foundations stated interests.
I agree. If I suggested that the Foundation should be the one to do this that may have been a little too casual. In theory, my first impression would be that protecting the public domain should be a government duty, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen. Perhaps a separate "Custodian of the Public Domain" may be the answer.
Ec
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 19:32:15 Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/20 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have to say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient. As a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same.
That's probably true, Nikola. The proposed attribution language is intended to balance the various positions (ranging from 'an URL should always be fine' to 'names should always be given'), the established
I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. For example, everyone who believes that an URL should be fine is also OK if all names are given, but not the other way around.
requirement). Our hope is that a strong majority will recognize the value of such a compromise, and the improvement over current state: huge complexity for re-users, legal barriers between groups that should be able to cooperate, inconsistent and confusing interpretations of the rules.
I agree that a compromise is necessary; I disagree that this is a good compromise.
And I don't think we can or should take the easy way out and not make a decision as to what the terms of re-use should be. But any decision
Absolutely agree.
is likely to offend a sub-group of people who feel it's going too far, or not far enough. Nor do we have complete freedom to pick any
Now I disagree. Some people are going to be offended if they are not credited when they think they should be; no one is going to be offended if they are credited when they don't think they should be. They may believe that this is stupid or pointless, but they won't really be offended in the same way.
I realize that some community guidelines have asked or encouraged print re-users to include a complete list of usernames alongside articles. (This, by the way, does not satisfy the GFDL's history inclusion requirement.) Under the proposed language, that would continue to be necessary for articles which have no more than five
As I said, I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient; and I do not think that this requirement is necessary. We can develop tools that would identify principal authors with sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short enough to be practically included in full. Given your example of France, per http://vs.aka-online.de/cgi-bin/wppagehiststat.pl?lang=en.wikipedia&page... about a third of edits are marked as minor, and that parameter alone would probably slash almost one third of the list of authors.
Please consider this, especially in light of recent research that shows that most Wikipedia contributors contribute from egoistic reasons ;)
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 2:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
On Wednesday 21 January 2009 19:32:15 Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/20 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
Don't know about this wording thing, but as a Wikipedia author, I have
to
say that I do not think that attributing me in this way is sufficient.
As
a Wikimedian, I believe that a lot of people will feel the same.
That's probably true, Nikola. The proposed attribution language is intended to balance the various positions (ranging from 'an URL should always be fine' to 'names should always be given'), the established
I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced.
I'd say the key to this whole relicensing debate is that the positions shouldn't be "balanced". It is my firm conviction that you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals. Thus, the arguments about how difficult and onerous it is to give credit fall on deaf ears. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to credit people. People have a right to be credited, and printing a URL in a book or on a T-shirt or at the end of a movie doesn't cut it. This is especially true because *it's the Wikimedia Foundation's fault* that it's so difficult to track authors in the first place. I personally was arguing for more care to be taken in this space and/or an *opt-in* move to a dual licensing scheme (and adoption of the real name field) *over 4 years ago* (yes Mike, I double-checked this one). The fact that these concerns were ignored for so long *is not the fault of the authors*. Our rights should not be violated or "balanced" away.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
I'd say the key to this whole relicensing debate is that the positions shouldn't be "balanced". It is my firm conviction that you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals. Thus, the arguments about how difficult and onerous it is to give credit fall on deaf ears. It doesn't matter how difficult it is to credit people. People have a right to be credited, and printing a URL in a book or on a T-shirt or at the end of a movie doesn't cut it. This is especially true because *it's the Wikimedia Foundation's fault* that it's so difficult to track authors in the first place. I personally was arguing for more care to be taken in this space and/or an *opt-in* move to a dual licensing scheme (and adoption of the real name field) *over 4 years ago* (yes Mike, I double-checked this one). The fact that these concerns were ignored for so long *is not the fault of the authors*. Our rights should not be violated or "balanced" away.
Questions: 1) Why doesn't a URL to a comprehensive history list "cut it"? If anything, I would prefer the URL be used instead of a simple list of pseudonyms because the URL will contain the revision history and will display not only who has edited the page, but also the magnitude of those contributions. Also, the URL doesn't cut out only 5 of the authors from the list when a reuser adds a title page (thus removing all credit from the vast majority of contributors). 2) Printing a small list of pseudonyms of the back of a T-shirt is no more helpful then the illegible legal disclaimers on TV commercials. Sure they satisfy the letter of the law but certainly violate it's spirit. A small comma-separated list tacked on to the end of a printed version, or scribbled on the bottom of a coffee cup may satisfy the letter of the attribution clause, but certainly does not satisfy it's spirit. Is it really better to have a list of authors that may be illegible, not-searchable and not-sortable? Wouldn't attribution be better handled by a well-designed web interface? Is it better for reusers to determine what is the best way to give credit, when we can give credit in a very positive and well thought-out way and let reusers simply tap into that?
--Andrew Whitworth
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:34 AM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
People have a right to be credited, and printing a URL in a book or on a T-shirt or at the end of a movie doesn't cut it.
Questions:
- Why doesn't a URL to a comprehensive history list "cut it"? If
anything, I would prefer the URL be used instead of a simple list of pseudonyms because the URL will contain the revision history and will display not only who has edited the page, but also the magnitude of those contributions.
As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious).
Also, the URL doesn't cut out only 5 of the
authors from the list when a reuser adds a title page (thus removing all credit from the vast majority of contributors).
I don't think crediting only 5 authors cuts it either. I think anyone who has made any significant contribution should be credited. I think there's some grey area as to what is considered "significant", but that grey area has nothing to do with the number of authors.
2) Printing a small list of pseudonyms of the back of a T-shirt is no
more helpful then the illegible legal disclaimers on TV commercials.
Frankly, I don't understand the point of printing a Wikipedia article on a T-shirt in the first place. This is a stupid example I include only for the sake of completeness, because others keep bringing it up.
Sure they satisfy the letter of the law but certainly violate it's
spirit. A small comma-separated list tacked on to the end of a printed version, or scribbled on the bottom of a coffee cup may satisfy the letter of the attribution clause, but certainly does not satisfy it's spirit.
How many authors is a coffee cup going to have? Again, I don't understand why coffee cups are even a consideration.
Is it really better to have a list of authors that may be illegible, not-searchable and not-sortable?
I certainly would consider it to be a violation of rights if the list of authors were illegible. If you can't fit the authors legibly on the work, then you can either 1) get special permission from the authors, or 2) write your own damn content. That's how rights work. You don't violate someone's rights just because it's convenient to violate them.
Wouldn't attribution be
better handled by a well-designed web interface? Is it better for reusers to determine what is the best way to give credit, when we can give credit in a very positive and well thought-out way and let reusers simply tap into that?
I think reusers should determine what the best way is to give credit. However, if they can't meet a minimal standard, then they ought to not use the work at all.
If you think a URL meets that minimal standard, then I guess we've reached an impasse. I think it's quite clear that it doesn't, though. Not without the authors *explicit* consent.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious).
As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others.
Frankly, I don't understand the point of printing a Wikipedia article on a T-shirt in the first place. This is a stupid example I include only for the sake of completeness, because others keep bringing it up.
Sure they satisfy the letter of the law but certainly violate it's spirit. A small comma-separated list tacked on to the end of a printed version, or scribbled on the bottom of a coffee cup may satisfy the letter of the attribution clause, but certainly does not satisfy it's spirit.
How many authors is a coffee cup going to have? Again, I don't understand why coffee cups are even a consideration.
Think about any merchandising opportunity where text from an article is used: T-Shirts, mouse pads, coffee cups, posters, etc. We can't have a policy vis-a-vis attribution that only covers cases where its convenient to follow. If we're going to demand that attribution be treated like an anchor around the necks of our reusers, we need to make that demand uniform. Either that, or we need to recognize that the benefit to easy reuse of our content far outweighs the need to repeat gigantic author lists.
Our authors contributed to our projects with the expectation that their content would be freely reusable. Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations. Demanding that authors be rigorously attributed despite having no expectations for it, while at the same time violating their expectations of free reuse doesn't quite seem to me to be a good course of action.
I think reusers should determine what the best way is to give credit. However, if they can't meet a minimal standard, then they ought to not use the work at all.
Letting reusers "determine what is the best way" is surely a pitfall. You're assuming that miraculously corporate interests are going to be preoccupied with providing proper attribution. If the requirements are too steep, people will either misapply them, abuse them, or ignore them completely. People who want to reuse our content will find themselves unable, and authors who could have gotten some attribution (even if not ideal) will end up with none. Requiring more attribution for our authors will have the effect of having less provided. Do you think this is really going to provide a benefit to our contributors?
--Andrew Whitworth
2009/1/22 Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be available. I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of the work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a website, it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a work can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both kept nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious).
As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others.
Use my stuff, that's why I write it! I dual-licensed all my article space text and pictures as CC-by-sa any a while ago anyway. More people should do this IMO.
- d.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.comwrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
As Thomas said, it requires Internet access, which might not be
available.
I think it's a bit more than that, though. The credit should be part of
the
work itself, not external to the work. When you're talking about a
website,
it's hard to define where the work begins and where it ends, clearly a
work
can span multiple URLs, and it's essentially meaningless whether or not those URLs have different domain names (at least assuming they are both
kept
nearly 100% reliable). None of these three things are true with books, T-shirts, or movies (for a movie a URL would be especially obnoxious).
As a contributor to these 'ere projects myself, I personally would prefer the less reliable but more informative URL for attribution myself. That's a personal preference only, and I don't see any need to push that on others.
I understand that viewpoint and think it is reasonable. How about adding a checkbox to preferences, that says "allow attribution by URL"?
Our authors contributed to our projects with the expectation that
their content would be freely reusable. Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations. Demanding that authors be rigorously attributed despite having no expectations for it, while at the same time violating their expectations of free reuse doesn't quite seem to me to be a good course of action.
I think it's clear that at least some people expected to be attributed directly in any print edition encyclopedias made from Wikipedia. Do you deny that, or do you just think it doesn't matter?
I think reusers should determine what the best way is to give credit.
However, if they can't meet a minimal standard, then they ought to not
use
the work at all.
Letting reusers "determine what is the best way" is surely a pitfall. You're assuming that miraculously corporate interests are going to be preoccupied with providing proper attribution.
I qualified my statement with the fact that they do need to at least meet a minimal standard. That said, I believe that corporate interests *are* best served by providing proper attribution. There may be some short-term gains to be had by violating people's rights, but in the end doing so will kill the goose that lays the golden egg, so to speak. (They'll also be unable to distribute their content legally in most any jurisdiction in the world other than the United States.)
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
I understand that viewpoint and think it is reasonable. How about adding a checkbox to preferences, that says "allow attribution by URL"?
Insofar as this satisfies my personal preference on the matter, I say that this is fine. If we added this checkbox to the software now there would be, of course, an argument about whether the box should be checked by default or not. Keeping in mind that the vast majority of user accounts are now abandoned, whatever we set for the default value of this box would become the de facto standard for attribution anyway.
I think it's clear that at least some people expected to be attributed directly in any print edition encyclopedias made from Wikipedia. Do you deny that, or do you just think it doesn't matter?
I don't deny it, but I am curious to see some evidence that this preference has indeed been made clear by some of our editors. I can't say that I've ever seen somebody express such a preference on Wikibooks, but then again we have a smaller community and are relatively insulated from discussions like this. To that effect, since people haven't clearly expressed this situation on Wikibooks, I think we could end up in a situation where different projects could handle their attribution requirements differently. The situation over there is sufficiently different for a number of reasons that it's probably not a good parallel anyway.
--Andrew Whitworth
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
We can develop tools that would identify principal authors with sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short enough to be practically included in full.
I disagree with this assertion regarding automation and can think of many situations both in which this does not hold true, giving false negatives (e.g. single/initial uploads of large contributions, uploads using multiple aliases, imports, IP numbers and not-logged-in contributions, etc.) and false positives (e.g. minor edits not marked as such, spam/vandalism, comprehensive rewrites, deletions, abuse/'attribution whoring', etc.).
The only 'tool' I can see being effective for identifying principal authors is discussion, which will invariably lead to conflict, create unnecessary risk for reusers and waste our most precious resource (volunteer time) en masse. Oh, and I would place anyone who considers their own interests taking precedence over those of the community (both within Wikipedia and the greater public) into the category of 'tool' too :)
Please consider this, especially in light of recent research that shows that
most Wikipedia contributors contribute from egoistic reasons ;)
Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related) are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki.
I might add that the argument that "you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals" is weak in this context, and that exactly the same can be (and has been) said in reverse:
"Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations."
Sam
On Thursday 22 January 2009 16:56:57 Sam Johnston wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
We can develop tools that would identify principal authors with sufficient accuracy; and this list of authors is likely to be short enough to be practically included in full.
I disagree with this assertion regarding automation and can think of many situations both in which this does not hold true, giving false negatives (e.g. single/initial uploads of large contributions, uploads using multiple aliases, imports, IP numbers and not-logged-in contributions, etc.) and false positives (e.g. minor edits not marked as such, spam/vandalism, comprehensive rewrites, deletions, abuse/'attribution whoring', etc.).
I find your disagreement wrong, your lists of examples mostly meaningless, and even a large percentage of false positives and false negatives preferrable to no attribution at all.
masse. Oh, and I would place anyone who considers their own interests taking precedence over those of the community (both within Wikipedia and the greater public) into the category of 'tool' too :)
If people feel they are not adequately credited for their contributions, they are less likely to contribute. Proper attribution is a need of the community.
Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related) are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki.
Great way to care about community interests, there. Sure to draw a lot of new contributors.
"Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations."
Luckily, that is not required.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Sam Johnston samj@samj.net wrote:
Please consider this, especially in light of recent research that shows that
most Wikipedia contributors contribute from egoistic reasons ;)
Wikipedia is a community and those who contribute to it for egotistic rather than altruistic reasons (even if the two are often closely related) are deluding themselves given they were never promised anything, least of all grandeur. What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors? If it is relevant to their field(s) of endeavour then they can draw attention to their contribution themselves (as I do) and if they don't like it then they ought to be off writing books or knols or contributing to something other than a community wiki.
I have "Author at English Wikibooks" listed very prominently on my Resume, and often reference it in cover letters I send out. This is especially true for job listings that require "good communication skills". My work on Wikibooks, even if it showed nothing more then my proficiency in the English language, helped me get my current job. Part of my current responsibilities involve writing documentation, for which I was considered to be very qualified because of my work on Wikibooks.
So I would say that yes, our editors can derive very real benefits from their work on Wiki. I will temper that by saying that it's up to the authors to derive that benefit themselves. We don't send out royalty checks so if authors want to be benefitted by their work here, they need to make it happen and not rely on other people properly applying attribution for them.
--Andrew Whitworth
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Sam Johnston samj@samj.net wrote:
I might add that the argument that "you ought not violate some individuals' rights for the good of some other (larger) group of individuals" is weak in this context, and that exactly the same can be (and has been) said in reverse:
"Requiring even 2 pages of attributions be included after every article inclusion is a non-free tax on content reuse, and a violation of our author's expectations."
Even if that were true (and it isn't), that still wouldn't justify the violation of the rights of those authors who want and expected to be credited. If your statement were true (and it isn't), it would mean that the only right thing to do is to not use the work at all.
To borrow a line from the GPL, "If you cannot convey a covered work so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not convey it at all."
2009/1/22 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors?
Don't underestimate the enjoyment of looking through the page of credits at the back of a printed book and finding your name! People like to be acknowledged, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose.
There is an analogous project. The thousands of contributors of quotations exemplifying use to the Oxford English Dictionary have their names listed, though not with the items they sent. the principal ones are listed separately, but even those who sent in a single quotation are in a list. I know people who have done just that, and are quite reasonably very pleased to be included there.
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/22 Sam Johnston samj@samj.net:
What value do they really think they will get from a 2pt credit with 5,000 other authors?
Don't underestimate the enjoyment of looking through the page of credits at the back of a printed book and finding your name! People like to be acknowledged, even if it doesn't serve any greater purpose.
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2009/1/21 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. For example, everyone who believes that an URL should be fine is also OK if all names are given, but not the other way around.
That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served. It's true that this is not the case for a large number of articles, but it's often the case for the most interesting ones. The proposed attribution language - to state names when there are fewer than six - is precisely written as a compromise. According to your own metrics, for very many articles, this would mean that all authors would be named. And the filtering of author names could be continually improved to exclude irrelevant names.
I would say that it's true that the people who have made the case against heavy attribution requirements have been typically more willing to accept compromise. What compromise are you willing to accept? Saying that 'you can opt out' does not address the concerns of the other side. Opt-in permanent attribution would be an alternative that would probably not have huge impact, and it could be offered only on a retroactive basis (e.g. for past edits, but not for future ones).
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served.
Not really. Remember that "reasonable to the medium or means" statement? Any means that resulted in serious encumberment would be unlikely to be considered reasonable. Compared the issues caused by copyright notices it's a pretty minor problem.
It's true that this is not the case for a large number of articles, but it's often the case for the most interesting ones. The proposed attribution language - to state names when there are fewer than six - is precisely written as a compromise.
Evidences?
2009/1/22 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served.
Not really. Remember that "reasonable to the medium or means" statement? Any means that resulted in serious encumberment would be unlikely to be considered reasonable. Compared the issues caused by copyright notices it's a pretty minor problem.
I really don't see how adding 2 pages of names to a 35 page article is a serious encumberment.
2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/1/22 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2009/1/22 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served.
Not really. Remember that "reasonable to the medium or means" statement? Any means that resulted in serious encumberment would be unlikely to be considered reasonable. Compared the issues caused by copyright notices it's a pretty minor problem.
I really don't see how adding 2 pages of names to a 35 page article is a serious encumberment.
Now read that article outloud and record it. Reasonable to the medium or means in this case however lets people follow the common practice of putting the credit on the record sleeve /CD jewel case.
Now read that article outloud and record it. Reasonable to the medium or means in this case however lets people follow the common practice of putting the credit on the record sleeve /CD jewel case.
"Reasonable" doesn't have to mean "common practice". How about reading out the names at the end? It's going to be a worse ratio than pages of print (you can't read something in a small font size, after all), but it's still doable (especially with text-to-speech converters, so you don't have to waste time reading all the names). Reading credits at the end is pretty common practice for radio broadcasts, anyway, why not do the same for CDs?.
2009/1/22 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
Now read that article outloud and record it. Reasonable to the medium or means in this case however lets people follow the common practice of putting the credit on the record sleeve /CD jewel case.
"Reasonable" doesn't have to mean "common practice".
It doesn't but is something of a useful indicator.
How about reading out the names at the end? It's going to be a worse ratio than pages of print (you can't read something in a small font size, after all), but it's still doable (especially with text-to-speech converters, so you don't have to waste time reading all the names). Reading credits at the end is pretty common practice for radio broadcasts, anyway, why not do the same for CDs?.
Because radio broadcasts have far shorter credit lists. Yeah to an extent you can do it with CDs but for 45s that is right out. However the license itself specifies "Reasonable to the medium or means" so this does not present a problem.
So "to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors" is an attempt to fix a non problem using means of highly questionable legality under the terms of the license and non US law as well is deny wikipedia authors effective credit.
It also prevents us from bringing in CC-BY-SA from third party sources which makes it further unacceptable.
Because radio broadcasts have far shorter credit lists. Yeah to an extent you can do it with CDs but for 45s that is right out. However the license itself specifies "Reasonable to the medium or means" so this does not present a problem.
Surely you couldn't fit a read out version of [[France]] onto a 45? What matters is how much space (in what medium) the credits take in comparison to the content. Reading the credits to [[France]] may take quite a while compared to reading the article (maybe half as long? Possibly less, especially if you read the names pretty quickly), but media big enough to hold the whole article read out will probably be big enough to still have plenty of room to spare (reading the article might take, what, 30 mins? Can you think of a medium that can hold 30 mins of audio but not 45?). (These numbers are all guesses, I've never done any recording like this, so I don't know how long it's likely to end up being, but these figures should give a reasonable impression, I think.)
So "to clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors" is an attempt to fix a non problem using means of highly questionable legality under the terms of the license and non US law as well is deny wikipedia authors effective credit.
It also prevents us from bringing in CC-BY-SA from third party sources which makes it further unacceptable.
Yeah, that's about it.
I understand Milos' concern, actually, and this is the most reasonable objection to a URL link for attribution purposes that has been raised so far. It is true that the Internet is by its nature impermanent, evolving both in content and in structure. It's by no means guaranteed that if we include " http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistry&curid=8005&actio..." in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019.
On the other hand, if we printed out the names in the book... then as long as you have the book you have the names, because they travel together. We may change the syntax of the history link, the most common method for locating content on the web may change (either structurally, or because of device evolution), or the sites might for some reason come down. We should also consider that ideally we want our content to be usefully credited in areas of the world where Internet access is very limited, or where Wikipedia is specifically blocked. Thinking ahead, these are the parts of the world most likely to be using a paper Wikipedia anyway.
I do understand that there are mediums where this is impossible, and I think perhaps the solution requires an outline that describes different (but reasonable) standards based on medium category, broadly interpreted.
Nathan
Nathan wrote:
I understand Milos' concern, actually, and this is the most reasonable objection to a URL link for attribution purposes that has been raised so far. It is true that the Internet is by its nature impermanent, evolving both in content and in structure. It's by no means guaranteed that if we include " http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistry&curid=8005&actio..." in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019.
I'm familiar with that issue, of course, and respect those concerns. That doesn't sound like what Milos was getting at, though, as his subsequent comments seem to indicate. Anyway, our developers are quite conscious about ensuring that links to our pages from external sites work in a reliable manner. It's also been mentioned that people like how our meaningful URLs make it somewhat easier to predict where to find things. I imagine there's probably room for improvement still, but I think we do fairly well in this regard. At some point, if people really don't trust the internet for anything at all, they probably shouldn't be republishing thing they found there.
Back to the question of attribution, as it relates to the medium. Milos made the observation about print as an older ("less advanced") medium that shouldn't have to point to the newer ("more advanced") medium. In reality, pointing across different media happens regularly, as has been mentioned. I also find it curious, for people to whom the difference in medium matters, that some of them would be pushing to impose more stringent attribution requirements on the older medium because of the imperfections of the newer one. Let's not punish print for the faults of the internet. You would almost think that some people are trying to ensure that their contributions can only ever be reused as online text, which is of course contrary to the purpose of free licensing. Nobody yet has found the perfect answer to cover all media forms, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to work out solutions.
--Michael Snow
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 9:56 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
It's by no means guaranteed that if we include "
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dentistry&curid=8005&actio... " in a printed book in 2009 it will still be accessible in 2019.
You're right, which is another great reason *not* to link to the history page URLs (which are as ugly as sin) but to the article directly (which is *significantly* more useful for the reusers' users). While I find it very hard to believe Wikipedia will cease to exist, the same can't necessarily be said for PHP and ugly GET requests are already a dying breed... If we do eventually find a sensible way to identify primary authors then we can always promote them to the article page, or a separate info/credits page (which could include other metadata like creation date, edit and editor counts, etc.).
On the other hand if we *must* have a separate link then perhaps appending '/info', '/credit' or similar to the article URL would be a better choice. Alternatively we could set up something like a purl partial redirect or even run our own short link service (eg http://wikipedia.org/x9fd) which would reliably point at a specific version and survive moves etc.
There are plenty of solutions - we just need to work out which one works best and offends the least people.
Sam
On the other hand, if we printed out the names in the book... then as long as you have the book you have the names, because they travel together. We may change the syntax of the history link, the most common method for locating content on the web may change (either structurally, or because of device evolution), or the sites might for some reason come down. We should also consider that ideally we want our content to be usefully credited in areas of the world where Internet access is very limited, or where Wikipedia is specifically blocked. Thinking ahead, these are the parts of the world most likely to be using a paper Wikipedia anyway.
I do understand that there are mediums where this is impossible, and I think perhaps the solution requires an outline that describes different (but reasonable) standards based on medium category, broadly interpreted.
Nathan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Sam Johnston wrote:
You're right, which is another great reason *not* to link to the history page URLs (which are as ugly as sin) but to the article directly (which is *significantly* more useful for the reusers' users). While I find it very hard to believe Wikipedia will cease to exist, the same can't necessarily be said for PHP and ugly GET requests are already a dying breed... If we do eventually find a sensible way to identify primary authors then we can always promote them to the article page, or a separate info/credits page (which could include other metadata like creation date, edit and editor counts, etc.).
On the other hand if we *must* have a separate link then perhaps appending '/info', '/credit' or similar to the article URL would be a better choice. Alternatively we could set up something like a purl partial redirect or even run our own short link service (eg http://wikipedia.org/x9fd) which would reliably point at a specific version and survive moves etc.
There are plenty of solutions - we just need to work out which one works best and offends the least people.
Sam
The way to go would be using wikipedia.org/history/article The software already allows doing that (it's not configured on WMF sites).
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
2009/1/21 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. For example,
everyone
who believes that an URL should be fine is also OK if all names are
given,
but not the other way around.
That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served.
But they granted a license to use their work under the GFDL, didn't they? The GFDL certainly allows listing all names, doesn't it?
If you're saying these people have a right to revoke the GFDL from their work, well, I won't argue against you. But I find it strange that you would argue this.
Erik Moeller wrote:
2009/1/21 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
I'm not sure that these positions should be balanced. For example, everyone who believes that an URL should be fine is also OK if all names are given, but not the other way around.
That's evidently not true. Many people in this debate have said that giving all names encumbers re-use of the work when such lists get very long, so they are not 'fine' with listing all names, because they recognize that there is an additional good (ease of re-use) that needs to be served. It's true that this is not the case for a large number of articles, but it's often the case for the most interesting ones. The proposed attribution language - to state names when there are fewer than six - is precisely written as a compromise. According to your own metrics, for very many articles, this would mean that all authors would be named. And the filtering of author names could be continually improved to exclude irrelevant names.
I would say that it's true that the people who have made the case against heavy attribution requirements have been typically more willing to accept compromise. What compromise are you willing to accept? Saying that 'you can opt out' does not address the concerns of the other side. Opt-in permanent attribution would be an alternative that would probably not have huge impact, and it could be offered only on a retroactive basis (e.g. for past edits, but not for future ones).
On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
"the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License"
There are over 100 Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licenses.
Attribution by reference to a URL only seems reasonable for online reuse to me. For content added directly to Wikimedia projects, you may be able to get by with including permission to do so in the terms of service, but for 3rd party content that doesn't work. If I write something on another site, release it under CC-BY-SA, and it is them incorporated into a Wikipedia article which is then printed and bound in a book, I expect my name (or pseudonym) to appear in that book. I'm easy going when it comes to the exact details of how it is included in that book, but I expect it to be there. Nothing else seems reasonable to me.
On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 2:39 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
This is a request for comment. I've posted a draft proposal for the license update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update
It is not intended to be final, but I hope we can arrive at a final version by February 1.
We would appreciate questions, comments, feedback. If there are obvious edits which you feel would make the proposal clearer, please do go ahead and make them, but please be careful about edits that substantially alter the proposal itself.
I really have a problem with the clause related to referring to the authors just via link to the appropriate page history. (It is not in the sense of necessity to list all authors everywhere.)
Imagine that online edition of Wikipedia doesn't exist anymore. While it is not so probable and I hope that it won't happen, it is one of the relevant options when we are talking about contributing authors of the content. And, of course, I may list a number of possible reasons how it may happen. Also, may anyone guarantee that Wikipedia will exist 90 years after death of the last author (less conservative, around year 2100; more conservative, around year 2200)?
So, I don't think that *just* linking to the page history is a reasonably addressed issue. Here are the issues which should be addressed:
* Thomas already gave distinction between online and offline.
* For the case if online Wikimedia projects don't exist anymore, appropriate attribution won't be pointing to the history of the article. It may be solved by giving more detailed information how to attribute authors if it is not possible to attribute them. It may be solved by giving an option to link to any database which consists the whole history of an article. It may be solved, also, by publishing paper edition of authors lists.
* For the case of offline copies, it should be solved reasonably in relation to medium. If someone is copying content on any electronic device, I don't think that it is unreasonable to add there full list of authors. If there were 1.000.000 of authors with 100 characters each, it is 100 MB of uncompressed document, which may be compressed a lot (maybe even to 10-20MB file).
* If it is about printed work, it should point at least to the appropriate printed work. It is really not any kind of reasonable solution to allow pointing from less advanced medium to more advanced medium.
By the way, even I think that in relation to all other issues Mike and Erik did a great job, this issue is really poorly addressed. Even this is the last main concern in relation to the licensing migration, you just put a simple goal "clarify that attribution via reference to page histories is acceptable if there are more than five authors". This is simply not an appropriate addressing of the issue.
While I don't care how my contributions would be mentioned, WMF has the obligation to the authors of the content to protect their rights reasonably. WMF is not the author of the content and can't act as it is the sole author. Copyright owners are contributors and protection of *their* rights should be at the center of any licensing issue, not protection or promotion of WMF and its projects.
Milos Rancic wrote:
- If it is about printed work, it should point at least to the
appropriate printed work. It is really not any kind of reasonable solution to allow pointing from less advanced medium to more advanced medium.
Independent of the relicensing debate, I don't understand this comment at all. Printed works very commonly include URLs to point people to material that is online. Some amount of adjustment has been involved as people sorted out the issues involved, but at this point it's quite routine. So I don't see why we should imagine for ourselves a rule against pointing to the web from print. (Or vice versa, for those people who think Wikipedia citations have to be to something available online.)
--Michael Snow
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
- If it is about printed work, it should point at least to the
appropriate printed work. It is really not any kind of reasonable solution to allow pointing from less advanced medium to more advanced medium.
Independent of the relicensing debate, I don't understand this comment at all. Printed works very commonly include URLs to point people to material that is online. Some amount of adjustment has been involved as people sorted out the issues involved, but at this point it's quite routine. So I don't see why we should imagine for ourselves a rule against pointing to the web from print. (Or vice versa, for those people who think Wikipedia citations have to be to something available online.)
This is not about giving more informations, but about giving the basic informations about the work related to the legal issues. My amateur knowledge of law says to me that I am always able to ask for printed legal document, even electronic one is available and preferable. While you should better know how the right to get authors list in appropriate form is connected with my right to demand printed legal document, I see them very connected and I think that we should act as they are connected. (Note, again, that this is not about referring to a document as a literature, but to referring to the authors of the document, which is far from equal.)
Milos Rancic wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
- If it is about printed work, it should point at least to the
appropriate printed work. It is really not any kind of reasonable solution to allow pointing from less advanced medium to more advanced medium.
Independent of the relicensing debate, I don't understand this comment at all. Printed works very commonly include URLs to point people to material that is online. Some amount of adjustment has been involved as people sorted out the issues involved, but at this point it's quite routine. So I don't see why we should imagine for ourselves a rule against pointing to the web from print. (Or vice versa, for those people who think Wikipedia citations have to be to something available online.)
This is not about giving more informations, but about giving the basic informations about the work related to the legal issues. My amateur knowledge of law says to me that I am always able to ask for printed legal document, even electronic one is available and preferable. While you should better know how the right to get authors list in appropriate form is connected with my right to demand printed legal document, I see them very connected and I think that we should act as they are connected. (Note, again, that this is not about referring to a document as a literature, but to referring to the authors of the document, which is far from equal.)
I'm afraid I simply don't understand what you're trying to say, then. It sounded like you were talking about having one document (web, print, whatever medium) point to another, something that might be done for attribution or a variety of other purposes. And if it's a question of pointing, I'm puzzled what difference it makes which medium is used or which direction one points across different media.
I'm also not sure what you mean by a right to demand a printed legal document. It sounds sort of like you're referring to this as a right you hold as an author (whether as part of basic copyright or a moral right). That's not something I'm familiar with at all. So it's likely that I've not understood what you mean correctly there, either.
--Michael Snow
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
I'm afraid I simply don't understand what you're trying to say, then. It sounded like you were talking about having one document (web, print, whatever medium) point to another, something that might be done for attribution or a variety of other purposes. And if it's a question of pointing, I'm puzzled what difference it makes which medium is used or which direction one points across different media.
I'm also not sure what you mean by a right to demand a printed legal document. It sounds sort of like you're referring to this as a right you hold as an author (whether as part of basic copyright or a moral right). That's not something I'm familiar with at all. So it's likely that I've not understood what you mean correctly there, either.
No, I am referring to my right as a user of the content. (Implicitly, it is about my right as an author of the content, but, explicitly, it is not.)
I'll try to be more formal in explaining:
1) There is a set of extended informations which I may get:
* For example, I may ask for some kind of *howto* (note, not an official recommendations!) document about achieving my legal rights related to, let's say, building a house. * I also expect in a contemporary book about, let's say, astronomy, to refer to some documentation related to, let's say, some places on the Internet related to the grid computing.
In both cases, strictly speaking, those are extra informations. In both cases it may be completely reasonable to have it in other form than a paper one.
2) But, there is a set of basic informations for which I have the right to get them in the appropriate form:
* For example, legal documents about building a house. * List of authors of a written document which I am reading (if that document is not in public domain).
In both cases, I expect that I get them in the most basic form. In both cases it is a paper form, not an electronic form.
The right of a reader of a book has to be "Send me the list of the authors [in the paper form]." (and, again, I think that you should know that better than me). If it is an explicit legal right (and I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be), then every publisher has the obligation to send the list of authors to every reader on demand. If it is not an explicit right, we should make a way how to fulfill this issue.
A couple of months ago, I mentioned that it would be really useful to have periodicals (let's say, yearly), which would publish the list of the authors of the content of Wikimedia projects. This is not just about fulfilling the rights of readers or authors, but this is, also, a very relevant bibliographic work (maybe the most relevant) of the contemporary culture. In cooperation with relevant international institution those bibliographical informations may be available in all national and a lot of relevant libraries.
Milos Rancic wrote:
On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net wrote:
I'm afraid I simply don't understand what you're trying to say, then. It sounded like you were talking about having one document (web, print, whatever medium) point to another, something that might be done for attribution or a variety of other purposes. And if it's a question of pointing, I'm puzzled what difference it makes which medium is used or which direction one points across different media.
I'm also not sure what you mean by a right to demand a printed legal document. It sounds sort of like you're referring to this as a right you hold as an author (whether as part of basic copyright or a moral right). That's not something I'm familiar with at all. So it's likely that I've not understood what you mean correctly there, either.
No, I am referring to my right as a user of the content. (Implicitly, it is about my right as an author of the content, but, explicitly, it is not.)
In that case, I really don't know where you get the notion of a right to a printed legal document. If the user has been given a license, then the user has whatever rights are in that license. But neither the GFDL nor any of the Creative Commons licenses indicate that you have a right to be provided with a printed form. And in the context of copyright law more generally, there's nothing at all like this.
The right of a reader of a book has to be "Send me the list of the authors [in the paper form]." (and, again, I think that you should know that better than me). If it is an explicit legal right (and I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be), then every publisher has the obligation to send the list of authors to every reader on demand.
It's an interesting concept, but simply doesn't exist anywhere that I know of. Perhaps you should suggest to those who want to have the identity of people editing from IP addresses exposed, that they push this idea as legislation. As it currently stands, I can publish something with no identifiable authors, no copyright notice, and no legal information whatsoever. Requirements like that (the US used to require a copyright notice) have been stripped away as an unreasonable burden on authors.
--Michael Snow
Michael Snow wrote:
Requirements like that (the US used to require a copyright notice) have been stripped away as an unreasonable burden on authors.
I don't think that that was the reason. The publishers would be the ones to make sure that the notice was there anyway. Like abandoning the requirement that registration was a precondition to copyright protection, it was a consequence to acceding to international treaties which demanded that copyright vest automatically in the author. The author could not lose his rights out of ignorance.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Michael Snow wrote:
Requirements like that (the US used to require a copyright notice) have been stripped away as an unreasonable burden on authors.
I don't think that that was the reason. The publishers would be the ones to make sure that the notice was there anyway. Like abandoning the requirement that registration was a precondition to copyright protection, it was a consequence to acceding to international treaties which demanded that copyright vest automatically in the author. The author could not lose his rights out of ignorance.
I'm aware of the background behind the change. I don't find any of it inconsistent with saying the requirement was deemed an unreasonable burden on authors, those are simply some of the arguments why it was unreasonable.
--Michael Snow
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