[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Robert Rohde]

To Anthony and Jussi-ville,

Why do you want attribution of work you have done on Wikipedia
articles to be acknowledged more prominently in dead tree media than
it is online?

That's the sense I get from you when you say that referencing an
online publication of the history is not okay.  If one looks at the
Wikipedia publication, in general one has to choose to seek out the
edit history and (in many cases) put effort into parsing through it
before they would even notice that you had contributed significantly
to the article.  You seem to be suggesting that in the case of dead
tree media you have an expectation that attribution be made
clearer/easier to access than it is online.  Is that a correct
understanding of your view point?  And if so why?

Personally, it feels antithetical to the principles of free content
and frankly a bit unethical to demand that reusers give a more
prominent acknowledgment to contributers than one receives from the
primary publication, i.e. Wikipedia.

-Robert Rohde


On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 4:30 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> For the title page, sure.  But the basic practice on Wikipedia is to list
> the username of every single edit in the page history.
>
> As for online sources, I think there are a lot of people upset about the
> practices of these "subsequent distributors", but for the most part it's
> just not worth it to sue them.  I suppose it'd be enlightening to send a
> DMCA takedown notice to a few of the big names, but even that takes quite a
> bit of effort, and for online sources it's fairly pointless.  I might have
> done it myself by now, except that I changed my username to the generic
> "Anthony", in part because for a lot of the articles I've contributed to I
> actually would prefer *not* to be associated as an author.  Of course, I've
> also largely stopped contributing.
>
> For dead-tree distributors, this is mostly untested waters.  Personally I
> would be extremely upset if I made significant contributions (say two
> paragraphs or more) to a Wikipedia article which was copied into a book, and
> I was not attributed in the book.  Printing a URL absolutely doesn't cut it,
> in my opinion, when it comes to a printed book.  Pheobe and company may have
> gotten advice from Eben Moglen saying that this was A-OK, but quite frankly
> I think he was both ethically and legally wrong.  I don't think you can draw
> any conclusions that this practice is an accepted one.  There just aren't
> that many dead-tree distributors doing this.  As far as I know I haven't
> made significant contributions to that book, though.  So that's someone
> else's fight to fight.
>
> I do feel like I need to speak up here, though, because the suggestion that
> I have waived my right to attribution is an absolutely false one.
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