[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 9:46 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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.)

This approach seems to me as a reasonable one. However, it has to be
defined well. If someone, let's say, prints the whole Wikipedia in
English, I don't see why not to print one more (or 10 more) books with
the list of authors. At the other side, it is true that it is not
reasonable to demand printing authors on a flier.

I've got one other, a very general idea about the solution. Here is the sketch:

- List of authors of particular articles should be printed
periodically. Yearly, or one in two or three years. Of course, we
should find some automatic way for gathering such data. (Maybe via
some specific user boxes.)
- Any printed book may refer to such periodical as the source of the
list of authors.
- Strictly speaking, this means that sources from Wikipedia in such
way may be used only from dumps which were sources for the printed
list of authors. If they are using newer articles, they should list
authors which contributed in the mean time. Generally, I think that
this approach is a reasonable one because it is not necessary anymore
to use the newest article to make a book about the most of the issues.
Otherwise, if someone is really willing to be up to date about some
current events, they should spend some more time in finding the rest
of the authors. Of course, we should make free software tools for
doing that.
- This is, also a good fund raising movement. If companies which are
willing to print books based on Wikipedia content are willing to have
such printed papers (and additions) once per month, then they should
give money to WMF to do so. If they are willing to have "the frozen
version" of Wikipedia for that time, they should give money for
servers; and so on.

But, it is not just related to Wikimedia. If Wikimedia introduces such
approach, supported by license, it may be a good source for funding
similar projects for keeping bibliographical data consistent. Which
is, at last, a very important issue in building a valid scientific
resource.

And, of course, it is not about fliers, it is not about full
encyclopedias. It is for the rest of usage. Defining what are the
borders is the task and it may be discussed a lot about it.