IANAL, but IMHO: * We already list *all* contributors for the page, in the page history. I'd say that the single click required to see it is comparable to turning a page in a printed version, which is not too much to ask, under any legal system I know of. * If you want to find the main contributors, go ahead and use the diff function. By listing them all, we also listed the main editors. * The fact that noone *ever* demanded to see his/her name on the article page itself indicates to me that there is strong community (=contributor) consensus regarding our current practice in that matter. * Everybody's free to use their real name as user name, or to write it on their user page. The additional click required should be tolerable, for reasons stated above.
If the GFDL really requires that list *on the same document* (can't be really the same page, think printed version again), can't we declare the whole wikipedia as one giant document in itself? [Translation to legalese would be required]
Magnus
Anthere wrote:
I was just made aware of this thread, and I realise that potentially a legal issue is discussed on wikitech. I would like the opinion of our lawyers on this specific point.
So, tel me if I understand well, to comply with the gfdl the best we can (and we already know it is problematic), what you suggest is to list first the real name contributors, followed by pseudonymes, then by ips. Of course, the number of names is limited. We can expect that on many articles, the number of names will be over 50 or more.
I understood the gfdl "normal" requirement is to list the 5 main contributors. We probably know that we can define who the 5 main contributors are. Indeed, unless the number of contributors is below 5, there is no way to report with honesty the legal requirements.
This said, if we can't report reality, why would we report a group of contributors more than another ? If a pseudonyme wrote 95% of an article, and 5% officially real names corrected typos, is that really correct to indicate these 5 real names and not the pseudonyme ?
I would say it is not. Legally, that is incorrect. From a community view point, that is setting a case which I am not sure is really positive. It think that it would be more correct to make random choice among pseudo or real names, or to choose among the last ones.
I will forward this to wikipedia-l and foundation-l, since I believe this is more than a technical issue.
Evan Prodromou a écrit:
So, I'd like to add a little block of attribution data to each page (optional, per-installation; I'm guessing Wikipedia wouldn't use this). Something along the lines of:
This article last edited on April 21, 2004 by Evan Prodromou. Based on work by Alice Notaperson, Bob Alsonotaperson, users Crankshaft, Deckchair and Eggplant, and anonymous editors.For each (distinct) person who's listed in the old table, it'd show their real name if it's set, or their user name if not. All anonymous edits would be lumped under "anonymous editors". Contributors would be listed with real-named folks first, then pseudo'd folks, then anonymous. There's no particular reason for that; it could be any other way (although I don't see a big point making it configurable).
The goal here is to make it easy for redistributors to comply with license provisions that require author attribution (such as some Creative Commons licenses), without having to dig through a whole bunch of history pages.
Anyhoo, the Metadata.php code already does most of this logic, albeit for output in RDF format. I'd like to take that stuff and put it in the Article class, in a method like "getContributors". The method could then be used both from the attribution code and from the RDF metadata code.
getContributors would return an array of arrays, each of which would contain:
0. User ID 1. User account name 2. User real name, if setAnother option would be to create User objects for each entry in the returned array, but a) I don't think that most of the User object fields (email, preferences) are needed, and b) I'd be worried about slingin' around incomplete User objects. So, I think the arrays are the best bet.
Does returning an array of arrays seem insane? Would it be wrong to add this method to Article? If so, where else would it go?
~ESP
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Am Donnerstag, 29. April 2004 22:40 schrieb Magnus Manske:
can't we declare the whole wikipedia as one giant document in itself?
We should avoid that in any case. Where it leads to was shown recently: It allows you to copy the whole Wikipedia naming just 5 authors (say Jimmy, Larry, Magnus, Anthere and Eloquence). That's absolutely not acceptable for the thousands of other contributors which don't get credited any longer for their work. Being the Wikipedia the document, you could even go further and copy just a single article, declare it to be a modification of the document "Wikipedia", and name for example Jimmy, Larry, Magnus, Anthere and Eloquence as authors on an article where they never contributed to.
Uli
Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
Am Donnerstag, 29. April 2004 22:40 schrieb Magnus Manske:
can't we declare the whole wikipedia as one giant document in itself?
We should avoid that in any case. Where it leads to was shown recently: It allows you to copy the whole Wikipedia naming just 5 authors (say Jimmy, Larry, Magnus, Anthere and Eloquence). That's absolutely not acceptable for the thousands of other contributors which don't get credited any longer for their work. Being the Wikipedia the document, you could even go further and copy just a single article, declare it to be a modification of the document "Wikipedia", and name for example Jimmy, Larry, Magnus, Anthere and Eloquence as authors on an article where they never contributed to.
Uli
The GFDL allows combining of several GFDL documents into a single one, so whether there is a declaration or not is irrelevant.
Anthony
"MM" == Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de writes:
MM> * We already list *all* contributors for the MM> page, in the page history.
I agree. However, it's difficult for downstream re-publishers to distill all the names and IPs from the page history to a reasonable attribution block. The RDF pages have it now; I just wanted to make it clear on the article pages, too, so you could print out a page and photocopy it and comply with licenses that require attribution.
For Wikitravel, we've had a couple of re-publishers who haven't given attribution. I just wanted to make it easier to comply with our license, which, by the way, isn't the GFDL.
~ESP
Well, we don't list *all* contributors for the page. We only list those before the "Automated Conversion", for which there were no copy/paste moves, and for which none of the text was taken from some other public domain, GFDL, or other source. And yes, *some* of the contributors could also be found, maybe, by looking for redirects to that page and seeing if some of the text which existed before the redirect was made was copied there, but who wants to do that anyway?
Personally I think the best solution would be a History namespace which was freely editable, but populated automatically by the software in the case of standard contibutions. If you wanted to get fancy, you could even have a textbox when you submit a modification which says "author" (pre-filled with your username), and hey while you're at it a checkbox for "public domain" in which case the history wouldn't be populated at all.
But I haven't coded any of that, and there's a fair chance I never will...
As for 5 "principal authors", really Wikipedia should be listing that already anyway, so it's tricky there.
If the GFDL really requires that list *on the same document* (can't be
really the same page, think printed version again), can't we declare the whole wikipedia as one giant document in itself? Well, 5 "principal authors" need to be on the "title page", which probably "means the text near the most prominent appearance of the work's title, preceding the beginning of the body of the text," unless you're going to define the whole wikipedia as one giant document in itself.
In any case, someone with authority over this (Jimbo or the board if there is one yet) should really make a declaration as to what the "document" is, what the "title page" is, what the "section entitled history" is, where the "copyright notices" are (or that there are none, which isn't really compliant with the GFDL), where the "transparent copy" is (the URL of which should be in the document), etc. And remember, all of this (the history, the title page, the copyright notices) is supposed to be to be contained inside whatever the "document" is, and the transparent copy thereof. Of course, the easier solution (which is far from easy) would be to just abandon the GFDL and use a simpler existing license or a custom one.
Anthony
Magnus Manske wrote:
IANAL, but IMHO:
- We already list *all* contributors for the page, in the page
history. I'd say that the single click required to see it is comparable to turning a page in a printed version, which is not too much to ask, under any legal system I know of.
- If you want to find the main contributors, go ahead and use the diff
function. By listing them all, we also listed the main editors.
- The fact that noone *ever* demanded to see his/her name on the
article page itself indicates to me that there is strong community (=contributor) consensus regarding our current practice in that matter.
- Everybody's free to use their real name as user name, or to write it
on their user page. The additional click required should be tolerable, for reasons stated above.
If the GFDL really requires that list *on the same document* (can't be really the same page, think printed version again), can't we declare the whole wikipedia as one giant document in itself? [Translation to legalese would be required]
Magnus
Anthere wrote:
I was just made aware of this thread, and I realise that potentially a legal issue is discussed on wikitech. I would like the opinion of our lawyers on this specific point.
So, tel me if I understand well, to comply with the gfdl the best we can (and we already know it is problematic), what you suggest is to list first the real name contributors, followed by pseudonymes, then by ips. Of course, the number of names is limited. We can expect that on many articles, the number of names will be over 50 or more.
I understood the gfdl "normal" requirement is to list the 5 main contributors. We probably know that we can define who the 5 main contributors are. Indeed, unless the number of contributors is below 5, there is no way to report with honesty the legal requirements.
This said, if we can't report reality, why would we report a group of contributors more than another ? If a pseudonyme wrote 95% of an article, and 5% officially real names corrected typos, is that really correct to indicate these 5 real names and not the pseudonyme ?
I would say it is not. Legally, that is incorrect. From a community view point, that is setting a case which I am not sure is really positive. It think that it would be more correct to make random choice among pseudo or real names, or to choose among the last ones.
I will forward this to wikipedia-l and foundation-l, since I believe this is more than a technical issue.
Evan Prodromou a écrit:
So, I'd like to add a little block of attribution data to each page (optional, per-installation; I'm guessing Wikipedia wouldn't use this). Something along the lines of:
This article last edited on April 21, 2004 by Evan Prodromou. Based on work by Alice Notaperson, Bob Alsonotaperson, users Crankshaft, Deckchair and Eggplant, and anonymous editors.For each (distinct) person who's listed in the old table, it'd show their real name if it's set, or their user name if not. All anonymous edits would be lumped under "anonymous editors". Contributors would be listed with real-named folks first, then pseudo'd folks, then anonymous. There's no particular reason for that; it could be any other way (although I don't see a big point making it configurable).
The goal here is to make it easy for redistributors to comply with license provisions that require author attribution (such as some Creative Commons licenses), without having to dig through a whole bunch of history pages.
Anyhoo, the Metadata.php code already does most of this logic, albeit for output in RDF format. I'd like to take that stuff and put it in the Article class, in a method like "getContributors". The method could then be used both from the attribution code and from the RDF metadata code.
getContributors would return an array of arrays, each of which would contain:
0. User ID 1. User account name 2. User real name, if setAnother option would be to create User objects for each entry in the returned array, but a) I don't think that most of the User object fields (email, preferences) are needed, and b) I'd be worried about slingin' around incomplete User objects. So, I think the arrays are the best bet.
Does returning an array of arrays seem insane? Would it be wrong to add this method to Article? If so, where else would it go?
~ESP
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"AD" == Anthony DiPierro wikilegal@inbox.org writes:
AD> Well, we don't list *all* contributors for the page.
This is true: the attribution block only lists those contributors that the software can figure out contributed. Stuff copy-and-pasted from other Wiki pages or other sources won't get attribution.
I'd like to correct this in the near future; I think the best way to handle it is to use field-value pairs:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-value_pairs
...and have a field called, I dunno, "outside contributor" or something.
[[outside contributor = Cory Doctorow]] [[outside contributor = Lawrence Lessig]]
(The "outside" is just a lame attempt to keep MediaWiki users from feeling they have to add their name in.) Wiki editors can note attribution in the body of the page.
But that's going to mean making field-value pairs work in MediaWiki, which probably won't be a 1.3 feature.
~ESP
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