Gregory Maxwell:
But you can't draw nice little boxes around 'communities', in effect trying to achieve this additional restriction in our licensing will grant the right to the site operators, not to the community.
The community is identified by its name. As long as you are writing on Wikipedia.org, you are writing as a member of the Wikipedia community. If you leave that community and start writing somewhere else, this doesn't change the fact that the material you wrote in the past was written as a member of that community.
So, I disagree, you can very much draw a box around the community by identifying it with its given name.
Of course, this was part of the intention of invariant sections in the GFDL which we quite rightfully realized were not good things to include in our work... But yet here we go, wishing to reinvent them.
If you don't want any requirements, use the public domain as I do. But if you do want requirements, these should be a reasonable reflection of the interests of the community as a whole. I think CC-WIKI is the best effort to date to address this.
So how do you address this situation: Wikimedia loses its mind, puts porno spam all over wikipedia. I create a fork called FreePedia, and the entire community moves to FreePedia. ... Now we have to credit Wikipedia? But why? the community is here?
First of all, no license grant precludes you from granting permission to any partcular site to do what it likes. For instance, FreePedia in its sign up form could ask users to put their past and present contributions udner a particular license. If indeed the entire community moves, everything is fine. Furthermore, such a scenario wouldn't alter the fact that the content was originally written by members of the Wikipedia community. So, stating that "originally this was written by members of Wikipedia, but now many of them have split away from Wikipedia and formed Freepedia, for [[these reasons]]" would be a historically accurate statement, informative, and sufficient to comply with the license. The achievements of the Wikipedia community, in its present incarnation, should not be denied credit because of potentially undesirable future incaranations.
There is no clear way to credit the community, it's dishonest to claim that by building in a credit to the Wikimedia Foundation operated site that you are crediting the community.
I don't think it's dishonest at all, I think it's very accurate, even if that community should fundamentally change in the future -- in the present it is very much identified as "Wikipedia". Even if that should change, this identification would still be a historical fact.
Sure that example is far out, but things like that are possible.. For a more realistic scenario, what happens if a substantial part of the community leaves and the community has split in two. This certainly has been seen on other wikis.
Acknowledging historical facts doesn't take anything away from anyone.
All that being said, I think it is completely reasonable to try to improve the way in which CC-WIKI credits the community, and to trace the community history as best as possible without placing onerous requirements on third parties. I suggest you work with the Creative Commons folk to make this happen: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/CC_Wiki
CC-Wiki doesn't make forking harder, it makes making a completely equal fork impossible.
I think that's a reasonable thing to do. Forks are *not* completely equal. They take the work produced by thousands and try to do something new with it.
It grants nothing to the community, because there is no unambiguous way to even define what the community is...
That's what you say. I say starting by identifying it by name, and trying to ease community transitions, is the way to go for wiki licensing.
Erik