Since we are on legal matters, I would like that enlightement is brought to me on a GFDL license point : the one that is about authorship :-)
Mav claims I am illegally removing the credit for text I did not write myself.
I answered that I mentionned in the comment box that I was not the original author, hence not doing anything illegal and definitly not stealing anyone else job.
Mav answers : Wrong. Read the author credit areas of the GNU Free Documentation License.
So my question is : if none of us has the right to attribute to himself the credit of something written by someone else, what happen to all the major amount of text that is regularly clipped from one article, and moved to another page by someone who is not the original author of the text ? How does the licence handle that ? If the moved text contains legal issues, who is said liable, the lost original author, or the one who took the responsability of the move and who is consequently the owner of the edit?
And is commenting in the comment box that we are not the original author of the edit not enough to insure legal rights of authorship are respected ? What are we supposed to do when moving someone else work ? Is commenting enough ? Or not ? Should we leave a message in the talk page ?
Depending on the answers provided (I really understand little of the gfdl matters :-))
I would like also to have an old edit of mine restored as *mine*, as I was the main author of it.
It is there http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Agricultural_science&action=...
The edits credited to Maveric and Robert Merkel are mine entirely. It was my fifth edit as Anthere. And my additions still constitute very much the core of the current article. It was a welcome present to the newbie Anthere that it was credited to someone else.
Not to be a pain either, but I would like as well, that the creation of the article "Trade war over genetically modified food" credited to Graft, be credited to me, as the content was my work (Graft just excised it from "genetically modified food" that I had made a few days before) and as most of the article is still essentially my work.
It is here http://en2.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Trade_war_over_genetically_modif...
Now,
* either legal issues are used to attack other wikipedians in dishonest ways, and if my work being credited to other people is making these edits illegal, then I really would like that these credits taken by other people be given back to me, to respect the license. I would not like that the license is not respected :-) In this case, any major move from one article to another should also mention clearly all the main authors of the piece moved.
* or we admit that we are together building an encyclopedia, that ownership is secondary in our building process, and that what is important is the content, not the author. I would very much prefer that option :-)
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This is an interesting question.
If i remember correctly, GFDL requires to give at least the 5 major contributors. But how we determine that for Wikipedia? Does this notion even has a meaning?
I agree on Anthere's point of view that we should all give up 'ownership' of articles, and simply work together.
Nicolas 'Ryo' (as myself, not fr: embassador)
Nicolas Weeger wrote:
This is an interesting question.
If i remember correctly, GFDL requires to give at least the 5 major contributors. But how we determine that for Wikipedia? Does this notion even has a meaning?
No, you do not remember correctly. The GFDL requires derivative works to give at least the 5 major contributors, unless the creators of the original work release that obligation.
The GFDL makes no requirements on authorship attribution to the original work.
I agree on Anthere's point of view that we should all give up 'ownership' of articles, and simply work together.
It would behoove us (and potential authors of derivative works) if we did explicitly state that we release people from the 5-author obligation.
Response to the legal issues in this thread posted here: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikilegal-l/2003-November/000066.html
For information on this Wikilegal-l discussion list: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilegal-l
Alex756
Anthere wrote in part:
Since we are on legal matters,
Since we are on legal matters, I'm also posting to <wikilegal-l>.
Mav claims I am illegally removing the credit for text I did not write myself.
I answered that I mentionned in the comment box that I was not the original author, hence not doing anything illegal and definitly not stealing anyone else job.
Mav answers : Wrong. Read the author credit areas of the GNU Free Documentation License.
So my question is : if none of us has the right to attribute to himself the credit of something written by someone else, what happen to all the major amount of text that is regularly clipped from one article, and moved to another page by someone who is not the original author of the text ? How does the licence handle that ? If the moved text contains legal issues, who is said liable, the lost original author, or the one who took the responsability of the move and who is consequently the owner of the edit?
And is commenting in the comment box that we are not the original author of the edit not enough to insure legal rights of authorship are respected ? What are we supposed to do when moving someone else work ? Is commenting enough ? Or not ? Should we leave a message in the talk page ?
I always figured that one should comment in the edit comment box "(taken from [[old page title]])"; although this doesn't list authors, nevertheless it tells people where (on the same site) to look them up. Then we claim, for legal purposes, that this is the "accepted practice" for citing authors in Wikimedia projects: to refer to an old page title where people can go to look up edit history and discover the authors.
- or we admit that we are together building an
encyclopedia, that ownership is secondary in our building process, and that what is important is the content, not the author. I would very much prefer that option :-)
But how to build that into the legal technicalities? The problem is that we really don't have any options there. We chose the GNU FDL a long time ago and are now at its mercy. Whether it's good or bad, it's viral, and we're stuck with it. (Which reminds me, has RMS shown any further interest in a Lesser FDL and in allowing FDL works to be relicensed under a Lesser FDL? This was to facilitate integration with other free copyleft licences, like Creative Commons BY-SA, if nobody remembers.)
-- Toby
From: Toby Bartels But how to build that into the legal technicalities? The problem is that we really don't have any options there. We chose the GNU FDL a long time ago and are now at its mercy. Whether it's good or bad, it's viral, and we're stuck with it. (Which reminds me, has RMS shown any further interest in a Lesser FDL and in allowing FDL works to be relicensed under a Lesser FDL? This was to facilitate integration with other free copyleft licences, like Creative Commons BY-SA, if nobody remembers.)
The reality is that we do have options. We are free to reasonably interpret ambiguities in the GNU FDL to suit our purposes as long as we preserve the intent. But that doesn't even necessarily apply to this situation.
One main thing to remember is that the authorship constraints on documents only apply to derivative works, not original works. Wikipedia is not a derivative work of itself; we can choose what our rules for attribution are without constraint by the GFDL.
For a very long time I've advocated making it explicit that the only authorship credit we should require downstream is "Wikipedia contributors" to avoid any bothersome bullying or complaints such as what Maverick is engaging in right now.
But I'll try to believe that his actions are merited by his good-intentioned but unnecessary efforts to follow the GFDL on behalf of 142 and not based on a goal of censoring anything written by 142.
In other words, I sincerely hope Mav isn't trying to use his interpretations of the law as a stick to bludgeon Anthere's attempt to disseminate what she believes is valid knowledge, because I find that tactic, used in the past by the Church of Scientology, Disney, and Bill O'Reilly to stifle critics, repulsive.
--tc
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