[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> --- On Mon, 10/20/08, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?
>> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Date: Monday, October 20, 2008, 4:21 PM
>> John at Darkstar wrote:
>> > Norwegian law says principal authors should be
>> attributed, and I believe
>> > its the correct thing to do. It is not a good reason
>> to say that today
>> > we can't identify those authors. Most of the
>> articles I've been involved
>> >  in writing has had very few principal authors, most
>> of them only one or
>> > two.
>> >
>> > In Norwegian law the principal authors can choose what
>> to do with the
>> > article, even relicense it, without asking any of the
>> other writers.
>> >
>> > It should be interesting to make some statistics over
>> how many principal
>> > authors there are for articles from Wikipedia. I think
>> the nom are
>> > pretty few, even for those articles that has grown
>> very large.
>> >
>> > John
>> >
>>
>> In Finnish moral rights law, the right to be identified
>> as the author of ones work is inalienable and absolute,
>> and cannot be voided even through a contractual
>> transaction.
>>
>
>
> I don't believe the right to be identified as an author is necessarily the same disscusion as the attribution appropriate for various formats. Publishing a work without any explict attribution to an author =! voiding that author's right to be identified as an author of the work.
>
> Birgitte SB

Agreed. I don't think anyone is suggesting that *wikipedia itself* is
doing away with the kind of attribution we currently provide; the
question is what standard reusers of content should be held to.
Arguably, the simpler the standard the more likely people are to
adhere to it. A minimum standard also wouldn't prevent anyone from
going above and beyond and crediting the entire list of authors, say,
if they wanted to.

-- phoebe