[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
> I might add that the attribution requirement of the GFDL talks about
> listing at least five principal authors, "unless they release you from
> this requirement." A fairly straightforward argument can be made that
> existing and accepted practice on Wikipedia, and for that matter on
> nearly all wikis, amounts to releasing subsequent distributors from this
> requirement. If the authors can make this implicit release, then you
> have to look at whatever attribution is customary in a given context,
> along with any moral rights issues.

Although no matter how well that argument holds for text written
directly into Wikipedia, Wikipedia has a non-trivial amount of freely
licensed text copied from elsewhere, and a large amount of images from
elsewhere.

So the "well they must have known because thats how we obviously do
it" clearly does not hold in many cases.