[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
[snip]

This is basically what is proposed at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GFDL_suggestions but there are a few
differences such as:

# Conventional named attribution be preserved in cases where it is
easy and reasonable to do so.

Consider, we copy an image from RandomFreeContentPhotoHost and stick
it in a Wikipedia article without the author's knoweldge.  Joe
publisher takes just that image and uses it in his printed book, and
captions the image  "RandomImage (source: Wikipedia.org;
http://.../randomimage.jpg)".

This may well surprise and offend the author, and we'll have to deal
with someone yelling at US saying they revoke the license, and yelling
at the reusers "the license says you must provide attribution!", the
mess here would be doubly compounded if in the meantime we'd deleted
the image and made the publisher look like a liar.

In cases where attribution can be directly provided, we should avoid
the middle-man.  This will match people's expectations.

# that history requirement doesn't depend on you linking to a
particular site, but to any that provides the history, which avoids
making a special right for initial ISPs and webhosts

Imagine:  Wikipedia turns evil and the entire community moves as a
whole to NotEvilPedia™.  Does it make any sense that NotEvilPedia must
forever direct everyone to the evil Wikipedia forever and always
simply because Wikipedia was the initial webhost for the community?

Of course not,  the purpose of needing a history link is to provide
the history information not to invent a new class of content ownership
for ISPs.  Anyone with a complete copy of the history should be able
to fulfill the roll.