[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:13 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Dude, now I really want to join NotEvilPedia. But where to host it? Sealand?

Also, agreed with both of these things, though how you determine
whether someone has a full copy of the history or not seems a little
dicey. We should really provide better easily-downloaded metadata for
articles (such as initial creation date, etc). And I would say that in
the photo example the proper credit would be both to the author & to
Wikipedia as source: Randomimage. (Credit: Joe Blow. Source:
Wikipedia.org, http://...randomimage.jpg, licensed under GFDL 11.16,
etc.)

-- phoebe