[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Robert Rohde]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> 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.
<snip>

As I suggested before, though less directly, unless Wikipedia directly
provides a quotable list of authors, I don't see any reason to expect
that other publishers should be prepared or required to create one.
They could copy the entire history, though many people acknowledge
that this goes over to the absurd for very long articles.  Arguably
providing a list of "principal" authors is a technically solvable
problem for Wikipedia with appropriate tools, though as Phoebe notes
there are serious questions about how one defines significant
authorship given the fluid nature of wikitext and the different
varieties of editing Wikipedians do.

For the long articles:

"Multiple Authors. 'Earth' retrieved from Wikipedia on Jan 1, 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth"

is about the level of acknowledgment that I would expect to see currently.

There are several problems with that.  I would say there should also
be (at least) a revision id, a reference to the history page, and
statements about free content.  But unless we can agree on the
structure we want to see in acknowledgments from reusers, then I don't
expect them to do much better than the above.

Part of agreeing on a structure for reusers could be agreeing on a
framework for who should be listed as authors, but until we have a
standardized way of providing that information in a useful form, I am
mostly surprised when publishers bother to list any authors with a
specific acknowledgment at all.  The more direct point is that the
free content movement should not be expecting other people to solve
the authorship problem if we ourselves are unable to do so.

So I welcome the discussion of where to draw lines on authorship, if
you really think it is possible to do so.  However, I personally am
rather skeptical about the ability to have a practical set of rules
for defining an author list in a way that would actually satisfy the
majority of people in the majority of cases.

-Robert Rohde