[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 3:35 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> However, I really think that we would come into a dead end if we
>> insist that every ~300 pages book has to print 100 (or 1000) more
>> pages of contributors. It is not a questionable issue, it is just a
>> matter of time: it is, maybe, true even today, it could be no true for
>> the next 5 years, but it will become our reality for sure.
>
> No, it really isn't possible.  For a 300 page book to require 100 pages of
> authors, each author could only have contributed 3 times as many characters
> as their user name.  Unless you're going to count vandals or
> vandal-reverters as authors, it just isn't going to happen.

Imagine that someone is making a 300 pages book about countries in the
world, based on Wikipedia articles. All basic Wikipedia articles about
countries have (~200) have, of course, much more than 300 pages. It
may have even 2000 pages. But, someone wants to use Wikipedia articles
to make a shorter book about the issue. Author of the book would use,
probably, introductions, as well as some other parts of the articles.
So, the author is not able even to try to count who contributed to the
introduction, but he has to count on article as a whole.

If I counted well, article about France has between 8.000 and 9.000
edits up to this moment. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that
this article will have 100 distinctive and significant authors -- if
not now -- then in 5 or 10 years.

I am reading now a B5 format book with ~40x70=2800 characters per page.

One name has, let's say, 15 characters (btw, I am sure that we will
demand listing the names if they are available, not just user names;
as I said before, some kind of user boxes may be used for that). 100
names would consume 1500 characters (let's say, 1400, a half of the
page). 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
article means that the list will be 100 pages long. Even 50 is a lot
(if we assume that not all articles about countries would have such
number of contributors, like article about France would have).

And, numbers will just be raising.

Of course, we may tell to such authors to make a research for every
single page and to find which contributions are still inside of the
article and which are not. So, instead of working on the matter,
author would have to analyze contributions for more than year (I am
not sure that I am able to make analysis of the article about France
in one working day; even if I assume a number of [existing and
non-existing] tools for that).

It is, simply, not reasonable; as well as it is not toward our goal to
spread free knowledge.

However, I really agree with you that all significant contributors
should be attributed.