Evan Prodromou wrote:
"DM" == Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com writes:
DM> ??? OK, what about the author requirement? The only DM> alternative is for them to list 5 authors of every article.
So, I guess I'm a little confused. Is there some kind of stipulation that download publishers don't have to credit contributors as long as they credit Wikipedia?
As far as I can tell, this is informal policy, but I have no idea where it stands legally. Since technically we license under the GFDL, with no additional caveats, it's quite possible a contributor could refuse to recognize crediting Wikipedia as sufficient, and instead demand that they personally be credited (if they are the only or one of five or fewer authors). So our policy seems to be more of an "if you do this, we, as Wikipedia, won't hassle you, but we can't guarantee that individuals won't hassle you". There is a possible argument that "Wikipedia" is the author itself of a collaborative work, which would be a more satisfactory solution, but would not work for GFDL's text that was originally published elsewhere and then appropriated by Wikipedia.
In any case, this discussion has gone around in circles a few times before both here and on wikilegal, and I'm not sure anything was resolved really. I'd personally try to avoid being legalistic about the whole thing, and ask people to credit us, rather than demand they credit us as a legal matter, since if we delve too deeply into the technicalities of our licensing, it's quite possible all sorts of things will start to fall apart.
-Mark