[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Anthony]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:51 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:43 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> > 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?
> [snip]
>
> I'm not stating my opinion on Anthony's position at this time,  but I
> do not think he is asking for additional attribution.
>
> On Wikipedia attribution is "on the next page", it's just over on the
> history tab.  This is analogous to including attribution at the tail
> of a dead-tree article, or perhaps in a separate authors index.  It is
> exactly analogous to providing attribution is a location which is
> certainly not immediately accessible to the reader, and which is
> potentially completely inaccessible.  (For practical reasons it may
> not be possible to provide an equivalent, as dead-tree is not an
> equivalent medium,  but this fact doesn't make a URL the equivalent or
> even the nearest fit)
>

Well, first of all, I never said that linking is perfectly fine with me.
Depending on how the link is handled, I have various degrees of
disappointment.  Ideally, I think online media should directly provide a
list of authors.  Linking to someone else's copy of a list of authors would
be next best (assuming the link remains valid and provides the list of
authors at the time of the copy).  Linking to the Wikipedia history page is
significantly worse, but right about where I'd draw the line ethically.
Linking to the Wikipedia article itself is over that line.

Printing a URL which someone can use to get the list of authors if they can
manage to get a computer, get internet access, type in, etc., is not at all
acceptable, for the reasons given by Gregory above.  It's also not
accessible because URLs go dead, and they go dead much faster than paper
disintegrates.  I don't think Wikipedia will be around 20 years from now,
but printed copies of Wikipedia probably will be.  A mirror which relies on
a link to provide attribution takes the risk that the link will go down, and
when that happens they have the responsibility to provide a new link or to
provide the attribution directly.  Dead-tree publishers aren't going to
recall all the books they've printed when a url goes down.

I'd be willing to set a threshold on who gets direct attribution.  I haven't
thought about it enough to say for sure, but somewhere around 50 words is
probably an acceptable threshold.  That's not all that much dead-tree space
to deal with.  Worst case scenario, if everyone wrote exactly 50 words and
had a two-word-long-attribution, we're talking about around 4% overhead.  Of
course, the tools aren't widespread to calculate that sort of thing, if
they're available at all.  But if that's what the rules say, then I'm sure
they will be developed.  And in the mean time, publishers can choose to
print all names instead of calculating which names to include.

Anthony