[Foundation-l] What's appropriate attribution?

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2008 at 2:47 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> 2008/10/24 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>>> More importantly:  You've picked a extreme corner case. Extreme corner
>>> cases shouldn't be neglected completely, but they are bad places to
>>> start policy discussions.
>>
>> Please do take into account that the most popular and "interesting"
>> articles are also often the most likely to have a very large history,
>> though. So if you're compiling a collection that's not focused on
>> fringe subjects, you're likely to hit some articles that have very
>> many authors.
>
> That is a fair point.
>
> Though you could still find more representative article than GWB, even
> among popular articles: at least at one point in time it had the
> longest revision history of any article. It's also unusually long, and
> atypically popular. It's probably a worst case, or close to it, in
> terms of both possible and actual author count.

The original example was [[France]], with 4077 authors, which is still
9-10 pages of authors in 10pt type. And I don't think [[France]] is a
corner case for reprinting at all -- I would hope that it and its
fellow country articles would get included in any typical educational
compilation, atlas, children's encyclopedia, etc. based on Wikipedia
content that got put out.

Yes, [[George Bush]] is atypical, but the chances of someone wanting
to reprint it -- again, for any educational compilation with
biographies it seems like a fair choice -- seem pretty high. I think
any attribution rule that gets made has to take these cases as well as
"more typical" 10-author articles into account.

-- phoebe