[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Thomas Dalton]

2008/10/20 Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>:
> 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.

Excellent question, I think this is going to be a very interesting, if
long, discussion.

> 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.

That's one of several dozen ways of interpreting the GFDL, how about
we ignore how things are done now and just look at how things should
be done in the future?

> 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?

Online you can link to an off-site credits page which you can't do in
print or in off-line electronic versions, so I think a distinction is
a good idea. We want people to reuse our content as much as possible
which means we should make reusing it as easy as possible. Including
an appropriate link is far easier than attributing contributors
yourself. In print, that isn't possible, so they'll have to include
the names directly (a printed URL is pretty useless).

> 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.

Again, online you can link to an off-site copy of the license, in
print you can't, so I would support including the license text in
printed copies of large amounts of content (for a yet to be determined
definition of "large"). Smaller amounts of printed content should
include a much shorter summary of the license since that's all that is
practical.

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

Isn't that basically what we already have with the history page
(possibly reformatted at bit)? I think we should certainly keep
history pages.

> 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?

The legal implications do certainly need to be considered, however.
Moral rights to attribution may well get in the way. Mike Godwin can
advise on US law, but someone needs to make official contact with
lawyers in other jurisdictions and get advice. Our content needs to be
reusable in any jurisdiction (to the extent possible, it's conceivable
that some jurisdictions will have laws that are completely
incompatible with our goals and we'll have to give them up as a lost
cause [a local chapter could lobby for a change in the law, of
course]). This mailing list is not the place for a detailed discussion
of the law, but that discussion does need to take place (between WMF,
CC, FSF and lots and lots of lawyers from all over the world - this
will probably cost a lot of money since you'll be lucky to find people
willing to work pro-bono is every significant jurisdiction, but is
essential).