[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Thursday 23 October 2008 22:22:26 Anthony wrote:
> 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.

He's referring to possibility to create a book that would have only the 
introduction from each article, yet it would have to list all authors 
(because you can't determine who was writing in the introduction and who 
wasn't).