On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Oliver Pereira wrote:
I'm going to ask something terribly controversial now. What sort of serious encyclopaedia allows anonymous contributions anyway?
Wikipedia. :-)
Oh, yes, sorry. I really meant to ask, "What *other* serious encyclopaedia", of course. :) But if you want to allow anonymous contributions, then I will go along with it, since you're the boss...
Unless, of course, this is incompatible with the GFDL, in which case it's not possible to go along with both the anonymous edits and the GFDL, and we'll have to give up one or the other!
To be honest, I hadn't really familiarised myself with the details of the GFDL before I signed up here. But I'm looking at it now. And it looks to me as if Axel Boldt has a valid point.
But first, I must admit that the definition of what constitutes a "Document" is unclear to me. I'm not sure whether each article counts as a Document, or just the Wikipedia as a whole. I'll assume that it means the Wikipedia as a whole. Fortunately, I don't think my argument is much affected by which meaning is used. (Phew!)
Every time anyone makes a single, solitary edit to the Wikipedia, their actions make modifications to the Wikipedia (the Document), and so the resulting updated Wikipedia *immediately* falls under the definition of a Modified Version. The section of the GFDL on modifications says that we have to identify "one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the modifications". The modifications being here those brought about by that single, solitary edit. In practice, almost every edit will be made by a single person, but an edit could be made by two or more people collaborating at the same keyboard. By the terms of the GFDL, at least one of these people must be listed. If there is only one person, then this person (and not just the computer they were at!) must be listed. In the case of my starting the stub at [[Prussian blue]], two authors were involved in just the one edit, although I only named one of them - myself. I think this satisfies the terms of the GFDL. (Unless the article itself is the Document, in which case the number of authors of the Document was at that time less than five, so both authors would have had to be listed to satisfy the terms. So I broke the terms. Sorry.)
So, in conclusion, every edit has to be attributed to someone! Okay, to "one or more persons or entities". But basically I think this means the person who did the edit. One *could* play word games and say that we are all just components of the Collective known as the "Wikipedia community", and in this case we could just label each edit as being by the "Wikipedia community". But I agree with Axel Boldt that isn't what the licence meant, and that if it did, we might as well just put "Humanity". I think that without playing word games, the licence is asking us to list the individual responsible.
Q.E.D. ;)
I do agree, though, that at some point we will want to have a "sifter" project or similar in order to create a Wikipedia release version 1.0.
That sounds an interesting idea. But who would be responsible for determining what gets into the released version? Would it be some sort of... cabal? ;)
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+