This is the third time these questions have turned around just on this project. We ARE erring on the side of caution which is why we have all the image pages (unlike others...).
I wouldn't mind doing more but I would question the value of useless gestures. For example if you say who wrote what is irrelevant I can get a list of the 60,000 editors including IP addresses who have edited any of these articles and add it as plain text at the foot of the license page (similar to the German DVD model) but does that really help? Legally I think its irrelevant but I would do it if it helped feelgood for contributers which is fair enough as an object. But isn't the point that Wikipedia should be credited and their fame comes from contributing to Wikipedia, whose greater glory we are supporting? We also have to consider the issue of "names which give offence". etc. If we do it this year I am prepared to bet the contributing list will include minor edits by user "Mr X is a ***" which userid was only deleted after an article was modified by them. As mentioned in the blog post I am already struggling with the number of unhelpful image descriptions and contributers names from the images, not to mention ones hoping "this *!?"!* upload works better than the last one". Try running a rude word checker over the image pages. While you are at it I notice there are a lot of obscene redirects around presumable from people who want to tell their mates "if your search for c*** on Wikipedia it returns an article on person X" so rude word checking the redirect database would be a good thing to set up too. Sigh.
There is a whole series of questions on what is a compliation and is Wikipedia a publisher etc. but my reading of the license is you have to provide a means of knowing you did what. Doing so locally is impossible (and not explicitly asked for) doing so by giving directions to find this elsewhere is what we do. Anything in between we could do but its fluff. Why don't you write 400 words on how Wikipedia is put together and by whom and I'll include that. That would achieve much more in terms of children understanding what is black and white does not fall out of the sky.
Andrew
On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
Sent off-list by accident:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Date: 2008/10/24 Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] SOS Children Wikipedia Selection 2008/9 BitTorrent link up To: Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org
2008/10/24 Andrew Cates Andrew@soschildren.org:
Hi Guys,
I have left a fairly full reply to this on the WMF blog awaiting approval from Jay and also it is discussed on the project pages on Wikipedia, over several years. There is a gap between the wording of licenses and urban myths circulating about what they say.
Broadly the GFDL demands that authors are "credited" but does not include anything on how you idenitify them (unlike the creative commons licenses). Either this means to comply with GFDL you need to carry a local copy of the edit history (which provides the only local way of identifying authors, albeit in a tedious fashion) including all
10,000 versions of the Global Warming article complete with every
piece of obscene vandalism etc.) or this means you have to credit authors providing a theoretically possible route to identify them. Nothing in between this is any better than the second option since to find an author for a piece of text you still have to go to the page history on Wikipedia. The German DVD which carries an author list copy locally which may be better for egos but is not more compliant than us: to get the author who wrote xyz is still a long trip through WP page histories. There is no different in license terms between a link back and any other way given of directing the reader to the page histories in Wikipedia. GFDL does not mention "link" (see Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License)
Some of the CC licenses include carrying a local copy of an artists preferred name (we do this as we carry the image pages).
Sure, it's been discussed constantly for the last 7 years and there has been no conclusion, so I would strongly advise erring on the side of caution. I see no reason to include each revision, the GFDL only talks about listing authors, not listing who wrote each bit. That means you just need the history page, not all the pages it links to. An obscure and non-explicit reference to a page that may well not be accessible to the reader, hidden away on a page I doubt more than 1% of users will read (or even be able to find if they wanted to know who wrote an article) is hardly in the spirit of the license, is it? All you need to do is include a list of names (and/or pseudonyms) with each article, that isn't hard.
If you want to encourage the use of free content, you need to do it properly. That you can convince yourself that you're just about complying with the license if you stand on your head and squint as you look at it is not enough.
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