[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Let me make a radical suggestion.  One that, for the moment, ignores
> all those overbearing legal questions.
>
> Why not assume that the appropriate amount of attribution for a
> Wikipedia article is essentially the amount that it has now?
>
> When you look at a Wikipedia article there is no list of authors
> (principal or otherwise).  There is simply a link to "history", a
> statement at the bottom of the page saying that the content is under
> the GFDL, and a link to the GFDL.  On the Wikipedia page itself, that
> is essentially the full extent of the licensing and attribution.
>
> I assume that practically all Wikipedia contributors are comfortable
> with recieving this very low level of attribution for Wikipedia
> articles.
>
> So, by extension, perhaps the goal should be finding a way to codify
> this scheme in a way that works both for us and for reusers.  Namely,
> making the requirements for redistribution of Wikipedia content to
> simply be:
>
> 1) A link or reference to the article's history
> 2) A statement acknowledging the free content license
> 3) A link or reference to the text of that license

<snip>

Totally agreed with this. See my message upthread. My sample citation
is missing an acknowledgment of the license; add that in and I think
you'd be good to go for most purposes. I think the concept "this came
from a bunch of authors on Wikipedia" makes more sense, intuitively,
as a crediting device than trying to say "this came from JoeBlow9567,
a particular Wikipedia contributor with bits of help from half-a-dozen
other people."

As for the argument that's cropped up occasionally that most articles
have only a few primary articles -- that is true for many articles but
by no means all, and we need to develop a metric that will work with
all cases, not just many of them. Additionally, as we go along,
Wikipedia pages will simply acquire more authors, not less, and we
need to develop a metric that will work over time. The problem I faced
when citing policies that had thousands and thousands of substantial
revisions is a perfect example of this.

-- phoebe