[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Erik Moeller]

The GFDL has specific attribution requirements that were designed for
software manuals. What's appropriate attribution for a wiki, where a
page can have thousands of authors, and a collection of pages is very
likely to? I would like to start a broad initial discussion on this
topic; it's likely that the issue will need to be raised more
specifically in the context of possible modifications to the GFDL or a
migration to CC-BY-SA.

The relevant GFDL clause states: "List on the Title Page, as authors,
one or more persons or entities responsible for authorship of the
modifications in the Modified Version, together with at least five of
the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors,
if it has fewer than five), unless they release you from this
requirement."

Most people have chosen to ignore the "principal authors" requirement
and to try to attribute every author instead because there's no
obvious way to determine who the principal authors are. I remember a
few years back that Anthony tried a completely different approach,
where he created a full copy of Wikipedia (under the assumption that
it's a single GFDL work) and attributed it to five people on the
frontpage. Anthony, please correct me if my recollection is incorrect.

The community process that has developed with regard to GFDL
compliance on the web has generally tacitly favored a link to the
article and to its history as proper credit. But, for printed books,
publishers have generally wanted to be more in compliance with the
letter of the license. So, the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume"
includes a looong list of authors in a very tiny font.

Is that practical? How about Wikipedia articles on passenger
information systems (screens on subways, airplanes)? How about small
booklets where there isn't a lot of room for licensing information?
Should a good license for wikis make a distinction between print and
online uses?

I haven't heard anyone argue strongly for full inclusion of the
_license text_. But I'd like to hear opinions on the inclusion of
username lists.

My personal preference would be a system where we have a special
"credits" URL for each article, something like

http://en.wikipedia.org/credits/World_War_II

which would list authors and also provide full licensing information
for all media files. If we had a specific collection of articles, the
system could support this using collection IDs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/collection_credits/Bertelsmann_One_Volume_Encyclopedia

(These URLs are completely made up and have no basis in reality.)

The advantage that I see of such an approach is that it would allow us
to standardize and continually refine the way we display authorship
information, and benefit the free sharing of content with a very
lightweight process. The disadvantage (if it is perceived as such) is
that if we would officially recommend such attribution in printed
books, individual contributors would be less likely to see their
username in print. But we might see more print uses because it would
make the attribution more manageable.

It's also conceivable to require full author attribution for printed
collections of a certain length or printed in certain quantity. (The
GFDL has "in quantity" rules, but they do not seem to apply in any way
to the authorship information.)

Aside from what the legal implications of any given approach are, the
first question I think that needs to be answered is what's desirable.
Thoughts?
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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