[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Anthony]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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).


Half of a page for the list of authors of France.  Now, I just checked, and
a printed copy of the article on France takes up about 25 pages.  So
attribution takes up about 2% overhead, if indeed there are 100 authors like
you say.


> 200 articles about countries with 100 distinctive names per
> article means that the list will be 100 pages long.


200 articles the size of [[France]], which would be a 5000 page book.  I
take it this is going to be split into volumes.

I'm sorry, your numbers are pulled too wildly from the air to be useful.  A
300 page book about 200 countries?  You're better off rewriting everything
"ab initio" than copying from Wikipedia for that.  The work to cull down the
information into that small of a format is going to far outweigh the savings
from plagiarizing the content anyway.