[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

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.

Just a few points:
1) there *isn't* really an accepted practice, which is why we're
having this discussion.  There just haven't been that many test cases
-- there have been very few attempts to reprint Wikipedia content in
large scale in print, rather than on another website where standard
practice has been to link back to Wikipedia.

2) For HWW, I think everything we used from Wikipedia would qualify
under fair use anyway -- we quoted few pages verbatim or at length, so
hopefully we're good for you and anyone else who disagrees on that
score.

3) For our book particularly -- if you can't get to a computer and
type in a URL, it's a pretty useless piece of dead-tree anyway, since
it's all about how to use Wikipedia online :P Of course that won't be
true for article collection reprints.

4)  When you say "significant contributions", that's the sticking
point for me. What's significant? A first draft of an article that
people then change completely? One paragraph? Two? What about adding
paragraphs that are subsequently removed and are not present at the
time of quoting the article? Adding some references? Any major edit?
Repeated vandalism reversal over time? It seems to me that this is
such a loose concept that might be interpreted so differently by
various editors that the reprinter is pretty much stuck with an
all-or-nothing approach -- either you print all the editors in tiny
type, which actually obscures the major contributors to an article, or
you use some sort of metric or value judgment in picking out
significant contributors, which seems like will always be wrong in
some way.

-- phoebe