[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 9:10 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 11:48 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>wrote:

<snip, including some sarcasm that was lost on the replier. Moving on!>

>> 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.
>
>
> Life (especially with regard to the law and ethics) works that way some
> times.  But just because it's difficult for you to determine exactly where
> the line is, that doesn't excuse you from clearly crossing it.

Actually... my all or nothing phrasing seems to have muddied the
waters. It seems to me the options are, when reprinting a Wikipedia
article in a book:

1. cite everybody who ever touched the article
2. cite some of the people who touched the article
3. provide a link back to a comprehensive list of everyone who ever
touched the article, which also has the benefits of handy diffs so you
can see who added what, etc.

Option 1) has the advantage that there are no questions and no
judgment that need be applied to the list by the reprinters -- here's
all the authors, plain and simple. It has the disadvantages that it is
technically difficult to get (there's no clean way currently to get a
de-duped history dump for a particular article, hopefully this will
change in the future), difficult to work with (we're talking thousands
of names for big articles), and arguably obscures the major
contributors (check out one of the Wikitravel readers for a great
example of this -- in a history section with a long list of all
authors, a la Bertelsmann, "Mike" is cited, then the next name on the
list is "Mike_sucks." Hmm, I wonder who made more constructive
contributions?)

Option 2) has the advantage that you actually (hopefully) highlight
the primary contributors to a piece. It has the disadvantage that it's
incredibly difficult to figure out a metric for who the primary
contributors actually are, and then once you've done that technically
producing the list is also hard (to nearly impossible for an average
person without the ability to write history-mining scripts or go
through the whole thing by hand, if you use a value-laded judgment
like "x quantity of significant writing).

Option 3) has the advantage that it's simple, easy to apply
consistently and you don't have to worry about getting all the authors
listed -- it's already done for you. It's also much more practical for
short applications, e.g. reprinting an article in a magazine. It has
the disadvantage that according to some contributors (and perhaps, the
current license) it doesn't give full and proper attribution to their
work.

There may be other problems and advantages that I haven't thought of
yet. I'll leave other people to hash out the moral, ethical, and legal
advantages of each approach. But these are the practical
considerations faced by a reprinter of content. It's also important to
remember, I think, that if we are trying, in general, to make
reprinting and reuse not just possible but smooth and easy that adds a
consideration to the problem. For my part, I think we need to think
carefully about this problem and come up with a good solution for the
sake of free content distribution in general -- producing content that
can be reused is a fundamental part of Wikimedia's mission, so let's
do it right.

-- phoebe