Krzysztof P. Jasiutowicz wrote:
On 21-08-2002, Jan Hidders wrote thusly :
WikiWiki is also about community building and as the biggest kid on the block Wikipedia has a certain responsibility here. The more interlinked the open-content sites are, the better it is. And as Axel already said, it is simply a matter of common courtesy: treat others as you would like them to treat you.
Knowledge, information and content cross all borders. It is the property of mankind. I agree that some acknowledgement should be made but not neccessarily on the page. I think most of us take advantage of a lot of sources and resources. We don't want them all listed on the pages ? OK. What's the consensus here ?
Here's my vote supporting the inclusion of credits on the article page. A distant second choice would be for a separate acknowledgement page.
This isn't an issue of somebody's legal rights. (The information in these long lists of kings is in the public domain.) It's as much an issue of courtesy and public relations. We don't sign our articles, but many Wikipedians use their user pages to give a long list of articles to which they have contributed, and that's OK.
The person who compiled these long lists must have done a lot of work to do this, and it doesn't harm the article to have the credit appear prominently. When the efforts of others are taken for granted they can easily feel ripped-off. There's no question of lawsuits, but sometimes we can lose potentially valuable contributors, or we can get a lot of negative comments on other people's pages.
Certainly our pages change over time, and a part of the editing process is making sure that links work and that they continue to be relevant. When the links cease to be valid, they can always be removed at that later time.
Eclecticology